Saussure: language as social fact

Mongin-Ferdinand de Saussure, to give him his full name, was born in Geneva in 1857, son of a Huguenot family which had emigrated from Lorraine during the French religious wars of the late sixteenth century. Although nowadays one thinks of Saussure first and foremost as the scholar who defined the notion of "synchronic linguistics -the study of languages as systems existing at a given point in time, as opposed to the historical linguistics which had seemed to his contemporaries the only possible approach to the subject -in his own lifetime this was far from his main claim to fame.
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