Swiss linguist and author Ferdinand de Saussure was born #OTD in 1857.

In his Cours de linguistique générale, published after his death by his students, he defined certain fundamental concepts (distinction between language, speech & language, between synchronicity & diachronicity, arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, etc.) that would inspire not only later linguistics, but also other areas of the human sciences such as ethnology, literary analysis, philosophy & Lacanian psychoanalysis.

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