Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure was born on 26 November 1857 in Geneva, Switzerland, and died there on 22 February 1913. He taught general linguistics at the University of Geneva from 1907 until his death, treating language as a structured system of signs rather than a list of historical forms, and distinguishing langue, the shared system underlying a language, from parole, an individual speaker's use of it. Two of his students, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, reconstructed his lectures from student notes and published them in 1916 as the Course in General Linguistics, generally treated as the starting point of structural linguistics.