Was the father of modern linguistics a survivor of sexual abuse?

An oddly overlooked episode in the life of Ferdinand de Saussure.

I’ve spent the past several months working on a book about language that I may or may not ever actually complete — and it is hard to write about language without encountering the father of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure. Though there are plenty of historical precedents for his work, it was Saussure who developed a structural account of language that has served as the basis for scientific inquiry ever since. It was Saussure who gave us our modern distinction between the signifier, which is the material form of language — the sound waves of speech, the ink on a page — and the signified, which is what these symbols represent. By insisting upon this basic distinction, Saussure transformed linguistics from an exercise taxonomizing and cataloguing languages into a scientific inquiry into how these languages work.

Given his place in history, there aren’t many linguists who haven’t at some point read about Saussure’s life as an academic. That’s why I was so surprised, reading through John E. Joseph’s fascinating (if meandering) biography Saussure, to read that

Something happened during Ferdinand’s last year at [the boarding school] Hofwyl, something serious enough for his father to withdraw him from the school in the spring of 1870. Something unspeakable enough for [him]…to refer to only as ‘deplorable things’ when revisiting the events in his diary a few years later. Ferdinand may have already been enduring it in silence for some time…

The author is appropriately careful here not to assume too much, but the evidence all seems to point in the same direction.

If Hofywyl was modelled after British public schools, its tradition was one in which the younger boys were at the mercy of the older ones, whom they were made to serve as ‘fags’, performing all sorts of services for them including those that would give the term its later homosexual meaning.

A friend of Saussure’s added that the absence of women at Hofwyl

deprived the boys of all feminine influences, and the result was, among a certain number of the boarders, secret habits which, fortunately, the director cut short with personal interviews which made a strong impression.

After pulling Saussure from Hofwyl, Sausurre’s father noted that he had become “always very silent, very inward; you never knew what he was thinking. Replied little to questions.” The author concludes that “The abuse Ferdinand endured at Hofwyl, which closed its doors in 1876, likely reinforced this inwardness”.

My guess is that this episode remains obscure simply because most linguists don’t think it relevant to his contributions as a scientist and philosopher. And substantively, I suppose they’re right. Still, Saussure’e experience is relevant to anyone who has survived sexual abuse because it reminds us of two important points. First, that such incidents are still far more common than anyone admits, and usually end up swept under the rug in a similar way. And second, that life isn’t over for anyone who has been victimized in this way. Saussure survived, and despite serious apparent trauma he went on to become one of the most important intellectuals of his time. His story is inspirational, and it deserves a much wider hearing than it’s been given.