Rereading three series of lectures on general linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure (1910-1911)

The last of the three series of lectures on general linguistics which Sauss ure gave in Geneva during the academic year 19101911 provided the editors l arge portions of the text of the Cours de linguistique generale. However, t he editors completely modified the order of these parts in relation to the plan that Saussure had mapped out and followed in his lectures. These chang es obscured the relationships between the parts and certain fundamental ide as of his thinking. In particular, they eclipsed the role which played, for Saussure, the laws which universally are at play in language and search he conducted along those lines. These laws also imposed important limits on t he arbitrariness of the sign. In the third course, Saussure shows more than one of those limits: the necessarily systematic nature of language; the ef fects of phonetic change; the delimiting temporality of any language. The s pacial diversity of languages finds its origin in the temporal diversificat ion under the influence de la masse parlante. It is due to this variability of any system that, according to Saussure, we find opposition between univ ersal laws, on the one hand, and the written languages which cover up the c onstant variations encountered in spoken language. As a careful philologist , Saussure could not fail to pay attention to the written languages. Still, they become, in as much as they interfere with spoken language, an element of variation.