Diachrony and History
Diachrony and History
This chapter first examines the only book Saussure published in his lifetime Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1878), which overturned the conventional approach to the problem of reconstructing Indo-European (IE) vowels. It then discusses how Saussure seemed to have lost interest in linguistic studies by the 1900s; the similarities and the differences between Schlegel and Saussure; and Saussure's efforts to distinguish between language as a “natural” object and a “historical” one (or in his own terms, between language as “static” and “motional”), a move that would in effect “cut” linguistics into two sciences.
Keywords: Ferdinand de Saussure, Indo-European linguistics, language, vowels
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