Comrades

Charles Bally

I have this former student from the University of Geneva to thank for pulling together all of my lecture notes to publish Course in General Linguistics. If he hadn't done so, there's a solid argument that I would have faded into the mists of history.

Young Charles was a formidable linguist in his own right (and Swiss, like me). The really touching part is that when I bought the farm, he took over my professorship in General Linguistics and Comparative Indo-Germanic Studies (they call that "Indo-European" now). He touchingly described me as "an artist down to the marrow" (source). Sniff.

Albert Sechehaye

Albert's another of my big fans. He was a Swiss linguist, and he was the other student of mine who edited and published (along with Charles Bally) my Course in General Linguistics. He went on to have great success in the study of the theory of grammar. On the shoulders of giants, right?

Jacques Lacan

Let's just say that this famous psychoanalyst borrowed liberally from my linguistic theories. He basically took the foundations of psychoanalysis and looked at them through the lens of language. Like me, he loved the playful use of words, although I suspect he felt there was a deeper meaning in words that revealed a lot about the psyche. I was more interested in cultural meaning than psychological meaning.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

It almost goes without saying that Claude rode the Saussure wave. Sure, he did his fieldwork in South America and examined all sorts of tribal myths (man, did he love him some tribal myths), but his interest in binary structures was straight out of the Old Saussurean Structural Linguistics bag of tricks. He made a lot of my ideas meaningful for anthropological study.

Rivals

Some Recent Linguists

So I've sort of got some sour grapes over these people. It's hard to be so universally praised and then have some voices from the wilderness calling foul on all of the accolades. Sure, I wasn't even alive when they started dissing me, but that doesn't mean I like it.

Take this Jan Koster guy, for one. In essence, Koster thought that news of my influence and importance had been greatly exaggerated. He said that after the 1950s, my relevance dipped significantly—and that Noam Chomsky basically took on the mantle as the universe's most valuable linguist. Much as it pains me to offer this quotation, Koster proclaimed in 2009: "For the most part, it seems, Saussure has rightly sunk into near oblivion" (source). Ouch.

Then there's this guy called E.F.K. Koerner. He's a close reader—he even wrote a book on me—so it's hard to quibble over some of his arguments. Sure, he admired my work, in his way; but like Jan Koster, he believed that in the long run, my influence was overrated. He argued that people didn't really appreciate my doctrine until the 1950s—a long time after my Course on General Linguistic was published. He also put it out there that the linguists who like my work only like parts of it.

I'd like to say "All or nothing, folks," but I don't think I'm in any position to do that at this point.