Saussure: language as a social fact.

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure (November 26, 1857 – February 22, 1913) was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid the foundation for many of the significant developments in linguistics in the twentieth century. He is widely considered the "father" of twentieth-century linguistics, and his work laid the foundation for the approach known as structuralism in the broader field of the social sciences. Although his work established the essential framework of future studies, his ideas contained many limitations and fundamental weaknesses as later scholars recognized that underlying structure and rules, while informative, cannot be the sole determinant of meaning and value in any social system.

Contributions to linguistics

The Course of General Linguistics

Saussure's most influential work, the Cours de linguistique générale (Course of General Linguistics), was published posthumously in 1916 by former students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye on the basis of notes taken from Saussure's lectures at the University of Geneva. The Cours became one of the seminal linguistics works of the twentieth century, not primarily for the content (many of the ideas had been anticipated in the works of other nineteenth-century linguists), but rather for the innovative approach that Saussure applied in discussing linguistic phenomena.
The most revolutionary element in Saussure's work is his insistence that languages do not produce different versions of the same reality, they in effect produce different realities. That different languages conceptualize the world in significantly different ways is demonstrated by the fact that even such "physical" or "natural" phenomena as colors are not the same in different languages. Russian does not have a term for blue. The words poluboi and sinij, which are usually translated as "light blue" and "dark blue," refer to what are in Russian distinct colors, not different shades of the same color. The English word "brown" has no equivalent in French. It is translated into brun, marron, or even jeune depending on the context. In Welsh, the color glas, though often translated as "blue," contains elements that English would identify as "green" or "grey." Because the boundaries are placed differently in the two languages the Welsh equivalent of the English "grey" might be glas or llwyd.