René de Saussure was a Swiss Esperantist

Esperantist

An Esperantist is a person who speaks or uses Esperanto. Etymologically, an Esperantist is someone who hopes...

 and professional mathematician, who composed important works about Esperanto

Esperanto

is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...

 and interlinguistics

Interlinguistics

Interlinguistics is the study of various aspects of linguistic communication between people who cannot make themselves understood by means of their different first languages...

 from a linguistic viewpoint. His chef d'oeuvre is an analysis on the logic of word construction in Esperanto, Fundamentaj reguloj de la vortteorio en Esperanto, ("Fundamental rules of word theory in Esperanto") defending the language against several Idist

Ido

Ido is a constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier to learn than ethnic languages...

 critiques. He developed the concept of neceso kaj sufiĉo ("necessity and sufficience") by which he opposed the criticism of Louis Couturat

Louis Couturat

Louis Couturat was a French logician, mathematician, philosopher, and linguist.-Life:Born in Ris-Orangis, Essonne, France, he was educated in philosophy and mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure...

 that Esperanto lacks recursion

Recursion

Recursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way. For instance, when the surfaces of two mirrors are exactly parallel with each other the nested images that occur are a form of infinite recursion. The term has a variety of meanings specific to a variety of disciplines ranging from...

.

Beginning in 1919, de Saussure proposed a series of Esperanto reforms, and in 1925, he renounced Esperanto in favor of his language Esperanto II

Esperanto II

Esperanto II was a reform of Esperanto proposed by René de Saussure in 1937, the last of a long series of such proposals beginning with a 1907 response to Ido later called Antido 1...

. He later became a consultant for the International Auxiliary Language Association

International Auxiliary Language Association

The International Auxiliary Language Association was founded in 1924 to "promote widespread study, discussion and publicity of all questions involved in the establishment of an auxiliary language, together with research and experiment that may hasten such establishment in an intelligent manner and...

, the linguistic research body that standardized and presented Interlingua

Interlingua

Interlingua is an international auxiliary language , developed between 1937 and 1951 by the International Auxiliary Language Association...

.

René was the brother of the famous linguist Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...

.

External links

• René de Saussure, French-language Wikipedia, accessed February 18, 2008.