L’être imaginaire : Saussure’s Colored Vowels

No figure would seem to be more antithetical to the idea of vowel-color correspondence than Ferdinand de Saussure, but Saussure also left an account of the colors of vowels (published anonymously in Théodore Flournoy’s Phénomènes de synopsie, 1893; attributed by Mireille Cifali, 1983). This chapter undertakes a close reading of the vowel-color text, finding Saussure’s colored sensations to be tied to a diachronic perspective on language. The chapter then turns to Saussure’s oft-neglected publications in Indo-European linguistics in order to show how his synesthetic perceptions of vowels might have informed his groundbreaking Thesis on the Primitive Vowel System of the Indo-European Languages (Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes, 1879). Supplementing the synchronic perspective for which Saussure is principally known, this chapter traces the implicit relationship between orthography, phonetics, and linguistic evolution in Saussure’s thought, presenting a surprisingly subjective, sensuous side of “Saussurean linguistics.”