Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand Mongin de Saussure (1857 to 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher whose ideas laid the foundation for major developments in linguistics and semiotics through the twentieth century. He is widely considered one of the founders of modern linguistics and, together with Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the two founders of semiotics, which he called semiology. His work introduced organizing distinctions that continue to inform how language is studied across linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology, and one of his translators, Roy Harris, credited him with giving later scholars the theoretical basis for a science of human speech.