588 f i na l f lo ur i s h

The question of linearity involves what it is that differentiates the two distinct
orders of value represented by signifiers and signifieds. Neither is material, in the
sense that signifiers are not sounds, and signifieds are not referents. Each is a
value generated by difference from all the other elements within the same system.
Yet there must be some particular nature to signifieds, and some other particular
nature to signifiers, that makes them part of one or the other system in the
first place—otherwise it would be impossible for them to be distinguished, and
to occupy their particular functions. Perhaps what makes a value into either a
signifier or signified is something that emanates, or is borrowed, as Saussure says,
from the material form in which it will find its realization. In the case of the
signifier, this is an ‘auditory nature’. The signifier will unfold, will find its eventual
realization, in parole, which exists in time. In order to do this it must borrow
time’s key characteristic, linearity, which the signifier possesses even though it is
mental.
The signifier could not have this virtual linearity without it being shared by the
sign, of which the signifier is an inseparable half. Signs will unfold over time, just
because signifiers must. And yet the signifier’s linearity does not percolate up to
the signified, considered in itself, but remains the characteristic that distinguishes
signifier from signified. What about the language, langue, defined by Saussure as
the entire system of signs? It too exists outside time, yet since signs share in the
virtual linearity of their signifiers, langue as a system of linear signs must also bear
the linear character borrowed from time, which makes possible its temporal
realization in parole.
He now tells his students to insert a new third chapter, before the original one
on concrete entities, and to entitle it ‘Immutability and mutability of the sign’. The
title indicates the paradoxicality of the fact that languages inevitably change, yet
no one can change them. The consequences of this phenomenon he describes as
‘incalculable’, the sort of evaluation he otherwise gives only to arbitrariness.
While Saussure sees the link between the signifier and signified as arbitrary, he
makes clear that because this link is arbitrary from the point of view of the speech
community as a whole, it cannot be arbitrary for the individual speaker. Change
in language always occurs unconsciously, never as the result of a wilful decision,
either by an individual or by the language community as a whole:
With respect to the idea it represents, the signifier <sign>, whatever it may be, is
arbitrary, appears as if freely chosen, being replaceable by another (table capable of
being called sable [‘sand’] and vice-versa). With respect to the human society that is
called to use it, the s[ign] is not free but imposed, without this social mass being
consulted and as if it could not be replaced by another. This fact, which to a certain
 1 8 . 1 9 0 9 – 19 1 1 589

extent seems to envelope contradiction of the non-freedom of that which is free, <this
fact> could be called informally the ‘forced card’ phenomenon. <The language is told:>
‘Choose at random’, but at the same time it is told: ‘you do not have the right to choose, it
will be this one or that one!’
If an individual wanted to change a French word or a mood, he could not,—even the
mass could not; the mass is riveted to the language just as it is.

Saussure uses the metaphor of ‘the forced card’, a fin-de-siècle parlour trick, to
create the illusion that the paradox of language being a system of arbitrary signs
that are nevertheless wholly determined is actually not a paradox. But it is only an
illusion.
Saussure does not deny the validity of the usual explanations given in his day
for immutability: the transmission of language across overlapping generations,
which excludes any possibility of sudden or general change; and the amount of
imitative effort involved in mastering our mother tongue. But, he argues, ulti-
mately both the mutability and the immutability of language result from the
arbitrariness of the sign. Were there some rational connection between signified
and signifier, it would allow speakers of the language to intervene either to
prevent inevitable change, or to initiate changes of their own. But the arbitrary
nature of the sign protects the language from any attempt at modifying it,
because the general populace would be unable to discuss the matter, even if
they were more conscious of language than they are. For in order for something
to be put into question, it must rest on a norm that is raisonnable, able to be
reasoned about.
In the systematic part of language, arbitrariness is limited and ‘a relative reason
reigns’, so here, theoretically, the populace (or at least grammarians and logi-
cians) can change things. Yet despite all the attempts of grammarians to reform
the illogicalities of French grammar (which in truth usually meant cases where
French differs from Latin), popular usage—or at least le bon usage of the upper
classes—has always prevailed.
Immutability has a social dimension as well. The fact that the language is an
integral part of everyone’s life creates a collective resistance to change initiated by
any individual. And it has a historical dimension: the language being situated in
time, solidarity with the past checks the freedom to choose: ‘It is because the sign
is arbitrary that it knows no other law than that of tradition, and it is because it is
founded on tradition that it can be arbitrary.’73
As for mutability, Saussure sees language change as always resulting in ‘an
alteration in the relationship between idea and sign, or of the relationship
between signifier and signified. It is perhaps better to say: a displacement of the
590 fi n al fl o ur i s h

relationship’.74 He cites the example of Latin necare ‘kill’, which has become
French noyer ‘drown’, through a series of changes in both sound and meaning
that it would be futile to try to separate.75 Because the sign is historically
continuous, it changes—inevitably, because language is not exempt from the
general fact that time changes all things. Against the usual explanation of
language change as caused by movements of peoples, invasions, and migrations,
Saussure argues that the source of change is to be found in the language itself, and
in the very fact of its being situated in time. Both the social and the historical
dimension must be considered: ‘The language is not free, because even a priori
time will give occasion to the social forces involved with the language to exercise
their effects, through the principle of continuity or indefinite solidarity with
preceding ages.’76
Saussure’s main targets in this chapter are the assumption by historical lin-
guists that language change must be externally provoked, and attempts to meddle
in the evolution of languages through prescriptivism and the creation of artificial
languages. Ironically, attempts to stop languages from changing involve making
changes—trying to enforce counter-natural rules like the one against splitting
infinitives in English, or in the extreme case, inventing a whole new language. Yet
in spite of all these efforts languages go their own way, the way of ‘usage’, what the
general populace decides unthinkingly to accept.
Saussure began his lecture of 30 May with a different idea: that time alone
accounts for the immutability of langue: ‘Why do we say: man, dog? Because
before us people said man, dog. The justification is within time. It does not
suppress arbitrariness, and it does suppress it.’77 We speak of the transmission of
language from generation to generation, but, as he said in the preceding lecture,
in fact ‘generations do not come after each other like the drawers in a dresser
<because within a generation there are men of all ages>’. In order to function, the
language needs to be socially shared. Hence ‘The non-freedom of the signs
making up the language [ . . . ] rests on the continuity of the time factor in
language, <on the continuity of the sign over generations>’. He drew this figure
to represent the relations involved:
time the language

weight of the collectivity

Accompanying it was the comment: ‘The circumstance that the language is a

social fact creates a centre of gravity.’ That ‘gravity’ is the ‘weight of the collectiv-
ity’, anchoring the language as time proceeds. In a recapitulation at the end of the
 1 8 . 1 9 0 9–1 9 11 591

lecture he will reintroduce this figure, this time labelling the bottom rectangle the
‘social mass’, then the ‘speaking mass’—where ‘mass’ has its scientific meaning
related to weight and gravity.
But it is obvious that time is equally responsible for the alteration of signs.
Saussure tries to resolve the contradiction by saying that the sign is subject to
change because it is continuous. If every ten years a new language were created
from scratch, there would no longer be any notion of the immutability of the
sign: ‘In every alteration, what dominates is the persistence of a good deal of what
already existed. [ . . . ] The principle of alteration is grounded in the principle of
continuity.’ This, however, says less about language than about the perception of
time generally. A person’s identity is a matter of persistence through time, yet it is
that same persistence that makes us perceive ourselves aging. But Saussure did
not find this point entirely satisfying, and went back to the drawing board.
<Addressing once more our point of departure, we shall have:>

Outside the fact of time By virtue of the fact of time

Arbitrariness of the sign 1. Non-freedom (Immutability)
thus Freedom 2. Alteration (Mutability of a certain order)

The examples which follow help to clarify what Saussure was trying to get across.
The principle of arbitrariness, which extends absolute freedom to the relation-
ship between signifier and signified, is enduring, indeed timeless (achronic). It
does not change even when the relationship between any given signifier and
signified changes—their mutability being inevitable because they exist through
time (diachronically), exposing them to Tardean forces of innovation spread by
imitation and repetition. That existence through time is itself the necessary result
of the fact that in time, at any moment (synchronically), the speech community
includes people who span generations, constraining them, in a Durkheimian way,
to maintain an overall linguistic continuity that produces the impression of
immutability.
Change always results, Saussure maintains, in a shift in the relation between
signifier and signified. Sometimes this is obvious, as when we compare French
noyer ‘to drown’ with its Latin etymon necare ‘to kill’. More often, though, the
shift is subtler. Old High German Dritteil ‘one-third’ was transparently related to
Teil ‘part’, but the Modern German equivalent Drittel is not, hence there has been
a shift from a more motivated to a less motivated sign, and Saussure has earlier
explained why motivation always implicates the relationship between signifier
and signified within each sign.
592 final flourish

He goes further still: such is the systematicity of language that ‘In no known
example has the relationship remained completely the same’; there is a ‘displace-
ment from moment to moment of the total relationship of the signified to the
signifier’, even in a case where each of them appears to remain the same as in an
earlier stage of the language. ‘This is the immediate corollary of the continuity
principle’: so long as a language is ‘in circulation’, relations shift through Tardean
collective change.
When he then asks, ‘Will Esperanto, <this attempt at an artificial language
which appears to be succeeding> obey the fatal law by becoming social?’, one
cannot avoid thinking of René and the internecine disputes among Esperantists
which it was his job to manage. For ‘naturalists’ such as Ferdinand’s old antago-
nist Regnaud, the answer to the question was that their rationally controlled
origins made artificial languages different in kind from natural ones, and imper-
vious to change.78 René believed that what protected Esperanto from normal
linguistic change was the psychological fact that all its speakers had some other
language as their mother tongue. Ferdinand, who in the second course had quite
clearly implied that Esperanto must change, does not make a prediction this
time, but offers an explanation for why it might not change: ‘It is not a compact
mass that uses Esperanto, but perfectly conscious scattered groups who have not
learned this language as a natural language.’ This sentence synthesizes the natu-
ralist and psychological arguments, and subsumes them within an essentially
social explanation: Esperantists do not constitute a social group properly
speaking, hence one would not expect them to be subject to the sorts of processes
envisaged either by Durkheim or by Tarde.
It is now that, preparing to close the revised chapter on static linguistics, he
recaps things from the beginning one final time.
[W]ithin langage, langue has been separated from parole. When everything that is only
parole is deducted from langage, the rest can properly be called langue and is found to
include only mental terms, the mental knot between idea and sign. But this would be the
language <taken> outside its social reality, and unreal (because including only one part
of its reality). For there to be langue, it takes a speaking mass using the langue. The langue
resides in the collective mind [ . . . ]79

Behind this redefinition of langue is the spectre of Esperanto, and of the Durk-
heimian collective mind which Esperanto speakers do not constitute. Each
Esperanto speaker instead takes part in the collective mind of the compact
speaking mass of his or her mother tongue. Esperanto utterances are acts of
parole proceeding from something like a code, not a langue. Presumably that
could change, if an Esperanto-speaking mass becomes a social reality.
 1 8 . 1 9 0 9 – 19 1 1 593

This brings Saussure back to his schema involving time and the bond between
the language and the social or speaking mass. This bond might be reckoned to
work on purely psychologico-logical principles; but ‘here intervenes the histori-
cal reality of time’, causing the ‘external realities’ that are ‘social forces’ to
‘manifest themselves in a social mass’. Saussure’s probable target here is Neo-
grammarian linguistics, with its psychologico-logical principles of exceptionless
sound laws tempered only by analogy. By refusing to heed any social force
external to language, such analysis abstracts itself out of history, in other words
out of time. It left the Neogrammarians unable to account for what Saussure calls
‘immutability’. They simply take it as the natural state of things, with change
inherently anomalous and therefore the only thing needing an explanation. Yet as
Saussure says, ‘<Let us simply invoke the fact> that nothing we know of does not
change with time’.

static linguistics: one last go

On 2 June 1911 he opened ‘Chapter IV. Static linguistics and historical linguistics.
Duality of linguistics’, reiterating that ‘the question of time creates particular
questions’ for linguists.80 Few of them see it as ‘a central crossroads, where one
is obliged to wonder whether it is necessary to remain within time or to step
outside time’. Other sciences are not subject to the same effect. Geology is mainly
concerned with historical changes, but when it deals with fixed states of the earth,
‘it does not make them a fundamentally separate object’. And although ‘there is a
science of law and a history of law [ . . . ] no one opposes them to one another’.
Much attention has gone to the fact that Saussure here inserts quite a specific
reference to ‘political economy (Wirtschaftslehre)’, which is like linguistics in
separating
economic history (political economy within time) and political economy (two different
university chairs). [ . . . W]ith political economy one is faced with the notion of value,
<(and system of values)> but to a lesser degree than with linguistics. One cannot take
simultaneously the system of value in itself, and the system of value depending on time.

Given that Saussure never directly cites sources outside linguistics, people have
naturally been tempted to speculate about the political economists he had in
mind and the extent to which they may have influenced his theory of linguistic
‘value’. One name that frequently arises is Pareto, whose correspondence with
594 f i nal f lo ur i s h

Adrien Naville and citations of Léopold de Saussure were noted in Chapter 14.
However, Ferdinand was already writing about value so early that if he absorbed
anything from political economy, it was probably during his year of attending
lectures promiscuously at the Université de Genève.81 His reference to the two
different chairs has to do with the internal academic politics of the Université at
the time. The social sciences had been growing with the support of William
Rosier. The establishment of separate chairs in economic history and political
economy, filled with men from middle-class backgrounds and socialist leanings,
was shifting the balance of power in what was still a rather small institution.
He proceeds to argue that a distinction between the ‘axis of contemporaneities’
and the ‘axis of successivities’82 is actually necessary in every field of study,
including the most practical ones. He gives the example of the value over time
of a property worth 50,000 francs—how it is like a linguistic sign, arbitrarily
fixed, and with ‘a counter-value such as 50,000 being itself subject to variation
according to the abundance of gold at particular moments, etc.’83 However, he
then saw the flaw in the comparison: the price might be somewhat akin to a
signifier, but the land itself, being material and in no sense arbitrary, has nothing
in common with a signified. He wraps it up by saying that ‘We have reached
maximum complication of the facts of value’, before remarking that values from
different epochs cannot be mixed. Indeed, it is no straightforward matter to
translate the value of the Swiss franc in 1911 into that of a hundred years later,
given the uneven shifts in the prices of goods, services, and labour.
He criticizes linguistics for having obscured the crucial distinction between the
vertical axis of the successive and the horizontal axis of the contemporary.
Historical and comparative grammar focused entirely on the former, while the
traditional grammar that preceded it was concerned only with the latter: ‘It <(the
Port-Royal grammar)> wants for example to fix the values of the French of Louis
XIV, without mixing in the value of the French of the Middle Ages or of Latin.’
Nevertheless, he says, ‘Its basis <in classical grammar> was much more scientific
than that of later linguistics, because of the latter placing itself before a terrain
unlimited in time; no longer knows exactly what it has before it’.
The lecture of 6 June opened with a remark that, from the speakers’ point of
view, diachrony does not exist; speakers deal only with a state. Hence, Saussure
argues, linguists too should first strive to understand the synchronic state. They
‘can only enter into the consciousness of speakers by adopting the viewpoint of
ignorance of sources’.84 One could not, he says, take a panorama of the Alpine
range simultaneously from Le Reculet, La Dole, and Le Chasseral, three peaks of
the Jura range on the north side of Lake Geneva. One can imagine a moving
 1 8 . 1 9 0 9 – 19 1 1 595

observer, going from Le Reculet to Le Chasseral, with his perspective shifting over
the time of the voyage, but that would be the equivalent of diachronic analysis.
Drawing the panorama requires focusing on a single state. This is more impor-
tant in linguistics than in other sciences because ‘The language is a system. In
every system, one must consider the totality, <this is what makes the system.>
[ . . . ] An alteration will have repercussions on the system by virtue of its
solidarity even though each change initially affects only one point in the system,
then spreads across it like the mountain trekker. To imagine all of it changing at
once is an error comparable to imagining that you could have a panorama taken
simultaneously from many places at once. ‘Never’, he will say in the next lecture,
‘is a system altered in its entirety.’85
So as not to be misunderstood as arguing for abandoning diachronic study,
Saussure asks: ‘Has it been useless, for grasping the static fact, to know its origin
<to know the diachronic facts>? No, this is useful. It shows us a fact to which we
shall have to return: the passivity of speakers with regard to the sign.’86 Still,
diachronic and synchronic facts cannot be combined in the same study. They are
of different orders.
The next lectures give specific examples of diachronic developments consid-
ered in this light. The lecture of 13 June returns once more to the chess metaphor
to show how, while on one level the value of each piece is determined by the
system, on another, subtler scale their value changes with each move made by
either player: ‘What causes the passage from one position of the pieces to
another, from one system to another, from one synchrony to another? It is the
displacement of one piece, not an upheaval of all the pieces.’87 Where the
metaphor fails, Saussure acknowledges, is that the chess player intends to bring
about an effect on the system by moving a piece, whereas ‘When the language
makes a move (a diachronic change), it does so with no premeditation.’88
The rest of this lecture was devoted to exploring the difference between
diachronic and synchronic laws, a topic carried over from the second course: ‘A
diachronic law expresses something imperative that is carried out against all
resistance. A synchronic law expresses an existing order.’ It is, in effect, what we
usually refer to as a norm. We do sometimes speak of ‘laws’ of human nature, but
loosely, since, in Saussure’s words, they are ‘ <Not imperative, not dynamic.>’
The 16 June lecture stresses again how speakers try out ‘every type of change’ as
‘trial balloons’.89 We only study them linguistically once they have been accepted
by the collectivity. It is now that the term ‘collective consciousness’ appears,
replacing the earlier ‘collective intelligence’ and ‘collective mind’. As discussed
earlier, the collective consciousness is implicated only in langue, not in parole.
596 f i na l f lo ur i s h

This is arguably the last significant idea which Saussure articulated in the
course. He had already begun to repeat earlier points, sometimes for the second
or third time. Given his general physical state, he was no doubt feeling exhausted
as the academic year drew to a close. His lectures were running out of steam. It
was as though he had said everything he had to say, and was filling time by
illustrating points with examples, but in some cases ones that distorted the focus
rather than sharpening it.
On 20 June, Saussure tried to ‘show the dependence and independence of the
synchronic fact in relation to the diachronic fact’.90 His best comparison is of
synchrony and diachrony with horizontal and vertical sections cut from a plant
stem. The horizontal cut shows ‘nothing other than a certain perspective, a
certain view that is taken of the vertical fibres that another cut, the vertical cut,
would reveal. The one depends on the other.’ With language, the synchronic slice
is the more important one, because it is what all speakers actually use in order to
produce utterances. The diachronic slice, on the other hand, is just something
linguists study.
The 23 June lecture is headed Static linguistics.91 Saussure self-deprecatingly
attributes ‘the looseness of this course’ to having introduced the static versus
dynamic bifurcation sooner than anticipated. One of the things which belongs
under static linguistics is ‘what has been called “general grammar”, which will
notably include the points at which linguistics is closely concerned with logic’.
Categories such as substantive and verb belong to static linguistics, because ‘it is
only by means of states of language that relationships and differences as found in
general grammar are established’. He does not mention that in his own studies at
the Gymnase de Genève, grammaire générale was part of the course on logic. He
opines that evolutionary linguistics is much easier and more attractive than static
linguistics, which requires perseverance to determine the relations and values
that it alone can account for.
The rest of the lecture is given over to ‘Preliminary remarks <concerning the
whole of static linguistics>’,92 which has to do principally with what is meant by a
language state, an état de langue. He admits that it cannot be pinned down in
terms of time: ‘There are spaces of time in which the sum of the modifications
undergone is almost zero, whereas other, less considerable spaces of time turn out
to be the theatre of a sum of very important modifications. [ . . . ] We call a state
the whole space during which no serious modification has changed the lan-
guage’s physiognomy.’ Yet that change is always ongoing, manifesting itself at any
point in time as variation between generations. He admitted that ‘We proceed as
mathematicians do with planes, they too ignore infinitesimal changes. [ . . . T]o
demonstrate things one is obliged to simplify them.’
 1 8 . 1 9 0 9–1 9 11 597

In the lecture of 27 June, yet again, for one final time, he revisited the first
principles of static linguistics: units, difference, value; and the two wholly distinct
spheres of how values are generated and coordinated, one syntagmatic, the other
associative. He introduces the term syntagm for the combination of two or more
elements giving rise to a particular relationship among them. Syntagmatic rela-
tions unfold in a single linear extension of time—just like, though he does not
mention it here, the individual signifier. Associative relations, on the other hand,
are outside time and space, being purely mental relations. He draws his example
from the activity he is engaged in at the moment.
Example: a word such as teaching will unconsciously call to mind the idea of a host of
other words which in one way or another have something in common with it. This can be
from very different angles. For example teaching will be included in an associative series
in which one will see: teaching, teach, teaches, teacher, etc. There is something in common
in the idea represented and something in common in the acoustic image. The signifier
and the signified together form this associative series. Similarly teaching—arming—
yielding: another associative series equally based on a relationship between signifier
and signified, but in another part of the word. Associative series based on the signified:
teaching—instruction—learning—education etc.93

He adds another kind of association that is not so familiar to readers of the

Course in General Linguistics:
One can have simple commonality in the auditory images: German blau ‘blue’—durch-
bläuen ‘strike with sticks’ ! has no relation to blau. [ . . . ] These co-ordinations can be
considered as existing in brain as much as the words themselves.

He reiterates that associative relations are not linear: they form a constellation, in
this case with teaching at its centre, though in fact they do not have any existence
in space. The syntagm can be called an assemblage of what a given word ‘has
around it’ in praesentia, in an actual utterance, while the associative series is what
the word has around it in absentia—what might have been chosen in its place.
He raises the problem that the sentence, assigned in an earlier lecture to parole,
is the core unit of the syntagm, yet here he is placing syntagmatic relations
squarely within langue. He admits that this is a ‘difficult question to decide’, for
‘<It is effectively here that there is something delicate in the boundary between
the domains>.’ Even a compound word such as Latin magnanimus or German
Dummheit is a syntagm, as indeed is an inflected word (dominus, domini, domino,
etc.), yet these are certainly part of langue. ‘In addition, there is a series of
sentences which are pre-formed for the language’, such as s’il vous plaı̂t, ‘and
which the individual does not have to combine himself.’
598 fi n al fl o ur i s h

Perhaps recalling conversations with his brother Horace, he brings in an

architectural metaphor, comparing an element of language to a façade with
columns. The relationship between the columns and the frieze which they
support is ‘syntagmatic’. But if one is looking at Doric columns, and comparing
them with Ionic or Corinthian ones, an associative series is being invoked, in a
way that Saussure calls ‘virtual or mnemonic’. Again he reminds his students that
linguistic analysis must not begin from the individual word or term but from the
system, the ‘solidary whole’ from which each element derives a value.
This leads into ‘Chapter V. Value of terms and meaning of words. How the two
things merge and are distinguished’94—certainly one of the great and enduring
questions relating to Saussurean linguistics: ‘When one speaks of value, one feels
that it becomes synonymous here with meaning (signification), and this indicates
another terrain of confusion.’ There is already a confusion inherent in the
everyday use of terms such as meaning. Saussure never entertains the distinction
established by the analytic philosopher Gottlob Frege between Sinn and Bedeu-
tung, ‘sense’ and ‘reference’, the conceptual meaning of a word versus the things
in the world that it denotes. If someone asks you what book means, you might
hold up the object in your hand, or a picture of such an object, or give a verbal
description of it, or the corresponding word in another language. All these fall
under what we normally call ‘meaning’—and none of them is what Saussure calls
the signified. Calling it a ‘concept’ implies that it is more or less the same as
Frege’s Sinn or sense. This is one of the terminological difficulties that so
frustrated him. ‘This is perhaps one of the most delicate operations to do in
linguistics, to see how meaning depends on and yet remains distinct from value.’
Here is the paradox, in Baconian terms ‘the cave’ containing a trap: it is that the meaning
which appears to us as the counterpart of the auditory image is equally the counterpart of
the terms co-existing in the language. [ . . . ] The value of a word will only result from the
co-existence of the different terms.

In fact the signified is itself, like the signifier, a value derived from its difference
vis-à-vis the other signifieds to which it is associatively related. Signifieds and
signifiers define two separate orders of value-by-difference, which the essential
role of language is to align. The ‘vertical’ alignment of signified to signifier ‘is
very hard to distinguish’ from the ‘horizontal’ alignment of signified to other
signifieds. As a result, ‘The meaning as counterpart of the image merges with the
meaning as counterpart of the co-existing terms’. This is true of values outside
language as well.
 1 8 . 1 9 0 9 – 1911 599

For example a twenty-franc coin: there enters into its value a dissimilar thing that I can
exchange (for example pounds of bread). 2) the comparison of a twenty-franc coin with
one and two-franc coins, etc., or coins with a similar value (guinea). The value is
simultaneously the counterpart of the one and the counterpart of the other. Never will
the meaning of a word be found by <considering only exchangeable things> but one is
obliged to compare the <similar> series of comparable words. [ . . . ] It is thus that the
system from which the term proceeds is one of the sources of its value. It is the sum of the
comparable terms as opposed to the idea exchanged.

This is not an ideal example. Exchanging a Swiss twenty-franc coin for a British
guinea is less like breaking it for ten two-franc coins than it is like buying bread—
and that is hardly akin to the relationship between signifier and signified, since
bread is a physical substance, exactly what Saussure has taken great pains to
impress upon his students that the signified is not.95 In the background are the
preparations being made for the first small issue of specimen spesmilo coins, for
sale at the 1913 World Congress of Esperanto in Bern. Legal tender in no country,
though with growing use in international exchange, René de Saussure’s spesmilo
was the first purely conceptual currency, and would actually have illustrated
Ferdinand’s point very well indeed.
He turns to how the plural does not have the same meaning in French as in
Sanskrit, which also has a dual number (a special marking just for two of
anything). The Sanskrit plural means ‘three or more’, while the French plural,
like the English, means ‘two or more’—the value is generated by the system as a
whole. Nor does French mouton have the same value as its English counterpart
sheep. ‘If one speaks of the mouton that is in the field and not on the table,’
Saussure noted, ‘one says sheep. It is the presence in the language of a second term
that limits the value that can be put into sheep.’ Here again, value depends ‘on the
presence or absence of a neighbouring term’, so that ‘meaning is determined by
what surrounds’.
On 4 July 1911 Saussure gave his final lecture on general linguistics. Again we
encounter no wholly new ideas, but the fleshing out of ones presented earlier,
sometimes with illustrations that will endure. The first question raised is: What
are ideas, psychologically, when abstracted away from the language? The tren-
chant answer comes straightaway: ‘They probably do not exist, or in a form that
can be called amorphous.’96 As in the second course, he says that the sound part
of language too is amorphous, until the language binds sound and concept
together.
The <linguistic> fact will give birth to values which <for the first time> will be
determinate. [ . . . ] Not only are these two domains between which the linguistic fact
600 fi n al fl o ur i s h

takes place amorphous, <but the choice of the link between the two> this marriage
<between the two> that will create the value is perfectly arbitrary.

This is the core of what is absolutely original in Saussurean thought: that the
connection between the two domains of values that relate to sound and to concept
is what creates each of them, is essential to each of them, and is the locus of the
essential arbitrariness of language. None of the parts on its own is original to
Saussure. What is distinctly, uniquely, his is the vision of language as the arbitrary
yet inseparable interface of these two domains.
As the time approaches for the course to close, he hammers home the points
he believes are fundamental as if he knows he is doing it for the last time.
[I]n a language, there are only differences without positive terms. That is the paradoxical
truth. [ . . . ]
There are not, strictly speaking, signs, but differences between signs.
[ . . . ] So the entire system of a language can be envisaged as differences of sounds
combining with differences of ideas. [ . . . ]
The principle, finally, that the thing comes back to is the fundamental principle of the
arbitrariness of the sign.
[ . . . ] We have considered the word as <term> placed in a system, <that is, as a
value.—Now,> The solidarity of the terms in the system can be conceived as a limiting of
the arbitrary, whether it is syntagmatic solidarity or associative solidarity.97

The bell is about to sound. There is time for just three last sentences of apology.
<In this course we have nearly completed only the external part. In the internal part,
evolutive linguistics is left aside for <synchronic linguistics and we have taken up> only
general principles in linguistics.
<It is on the basis of these general principles that the details of a static state or the law
of static states will be fruitfully addressed.>

With this acknowledgment of what he had done and failed to do, Saussure closed
the course. As always, much had been left unsaid, and his readiness to risk
exploring new ideas had produced some contradictions and stuttering along
with the gems of insight. But he had pushed his vision of the synchronic
linguistic system to its fullest development.
 19

THE END: 1 9 1 1–1 9 1 3

home and away

T HE summer of 1911 was dominated by simmering tensions between France

and Germany. It was an apt time for Saussure to produce his brief article on
‘Alamans’ for a historical dictionary of the Canton of Vaud.1 The Alamanni, a
southern Germanic people, were ancestors to the Swiss Germans and traditional
rivals to the Burgundian ancestors of the Saussures. But Alamannic as well as
Burgundian blood flowed in his veins, and his interest in the ancient Germanic
legends connected him with a time when the Alamans and Burgundians were still
culturally one.
The article traces the Alamanni from the third century to their defeat by Clovis
in 506, when they lost their independence but maintained their identity as a
dukedom under the empire. Their later expansions and dispersions are obscure,
but Saussure notes that some light on their settling in the Vaud had recently
been shed by his colleague Muret’s research into local place names. The
article is peppered with etymological insights, such as about how the name
‘Alamans’—‘all-men’, believed originally to have designated a league of ten or
twelve tribes who banded together at the battle of Strasbourg in 357—although all
but lost from Germanic dialects, survived ‘in the popular usage of the Romance-
speaking peoples, who later would apply it to the ensemble of the inhabitants of
Germany (Allemands)’.2 The bibliography cites mostly German historical works,
and Paul’s newly published opus on Germanic philology,3 but also a study by
Paul-Edmond Martin,4 the son-in-law of his old friend Amé Pictet. A few years
later Martin would undertake the first posthumous publication of a paper of
Saussure’s.5
For now, though, Saussure’s health had improved enough for him and Marie
to set off for England in October, before the start of the autumn term.6 It would
be his last voyage of any length, but no grand tour, just a family visit to Albertine