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AN EXTRAORDINARY INTUITION ON THE PART OF FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE.

(A contribution to Saussure’s hypogrammatic thesis by Mario Coll Rodríguez)

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION.

Saussure developed a thesis that has not resonated much among linguists. Despite Jakobson calling it
“extraordinary intuition”, it has not hitherto been an object of study, at least within Spanish philological
circles. The current denominated hypogrammatic thesis intends to find the rules that would show the
presence of a cryptographed name of a god or mythological figure in classical poetry. Saussure believed,
for example, to have found it with the name of the goddess Aphrodite in the De Rerum Natura by
Lucretius. In yet another case, it would also be found in Homer’s work with the name of Agamemnon
and so on. In keeping with this approach, Saussure thought that in the case of Vedic texts especially, the
names of these deities such as Agni,the god of fire, in The Rigvedacould be found intentionally
concealed. Armed with these references, I set out to investigate a likely resonance of the name Krishna
in The Bhagavad Gita – the gospel of Hinduism par excellence devoted to him. To my surprise, I
discovered a constant phonetic invocation, a vocal footprint which I shall try to point out in this article.
The current text will equally serve as the basis for a thesis to highlight the political intentionality in
religious syncretism which will soon come to light.

While Ferdinand de Saussure was dictating lecture notes of the well-known Course in General
Linguisticsbetween 1906 and 1911, he was also profoundly, in fact almost obsessively given to the study
and development of his theory on the so-called hypogram, albeit initially referring to it as anagram,
polyphony, logogram, etc.

Saussure’s feverish anagrammatic investigative work focuses especially on the years spanning 1906
and 1909 giving it extensive coverage in 117 notebooks with notes now kept in the library in Geneva.
The Course in General Linguisticswas published in 1916 thanks to the efforts of Meillet and Bally but the
anagrammatic studies

will only appear 50 later in 1964. This caused upheaval in some philological circles truly interested in
linguistic issues. Even then, these studies did not get to be published in their entirety. The question
Saussure posed and left unanswered on his death was whether this hypogrammatic tradition held water
and if so, how and why the authors chose not to leave evidence of the rules governing them even in the
supposition of a secret fraternity which passed this knowledge over time. How come there was no
traitor given that there have always been. The other possible explanation is that it may have been
something so self-evident that nobody saw the need to give any rules. But if, in this case, it was
something so evident, how come that nobody had thought about it before him? It’s the case of going
around in circles. Starobinski’s 1964 book focuses on some notebooks with ambiguous epigraphs which
Godel reluctantly compiled. It is equally based on some articles by Jakobson and comments which
appeared in the Tel Quel and Le Mercure magazines.

The entire collection of notebooks is now in the library in Geneva as I have mentioned earlier but have
never been completely published.

Even though Jakobson referred to it as “extraordinary intuition”, it has not been, I insist, the object of
study that it deserves (barring the exceptional thesis Semiótica del Anagrama by lecturer Raúl Rodríguez
Ferrándiz. Alicante Publishing 1998). Though the aforementioned thesis does not tackle the subject of
the Vedic texts – of great importance to Saussure – it does serve as an introduction to the concept as
lecturer Antonio Rodríguez Reyhighlights in the quotation “…anagrams reopen the case of even the
scientific bases of language in terms of double articulation and the morphemic function of the syllable
whose very constitution goes against that of the isolated phoneme of meaning and thereby
reconstitutes the separation between phonetics and phonology on the paradigm of utterance (parole)
within diachrony and the simultaneousness or abstract, suspensive, phenomenological and locutionary
time considerations of the language (langue) system. “Undulatory” morphology synthesizes phonetics
and morphologic synchrony (Gandon, 2002, 161). It’s also possible that an anagrammatic function exists
within neuron networks (El gramma poético: Germen precientífico del lenguaje, page 141, Antropos
Barcelona 2014)

This so-called hypogrammatic thesis intends to find the rules that would show the existence of a
cryptographed name of a deity or mythological figure in the works of most classical poets and especially
in Vedic literature that operate as a TOPIC-WORD or STICHTWORT. In keeping with this, Saussure
reasoned that in Vedic texts especially, these names of deities could be found intentionally concealed.
This is the already mentioned case of the god of fire Agni in The Rigveda.

And where did it all start?

It starts here:

“Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus Gnoivod patre prognatus, fortis vir sapiensque quoius
forma virtutei parisma fuit Consol censor aidilis parisma fuit.

Taurasia Cisauma Samnio cepit

Subigit omne Loucanam opsidesque abdoucit.”

(I have highlighted the letters that stand for the name of SCIPIO in bold)

As such, the verse Taurasia Cisauma Samnio cepit would be anagrammatic since it encompasses
the name of Scipio (Starobinski citing Saussure in Words upon Words, Barcelona 1996).

The epitaph to make things clearer goes like this:

“Lucius Cornelius Scipio, son of Gneo: Cornelius Lucius, son of Gneo, valiant name, I am, a sage
whose beauty equalled the virtue that he was among you consul censor town councillor, took
Taurasia and Cisauma in Samnium, subdues all of Lucania and takes hostages”.

It is the translation of a Saturnian verse. Leaving out the complex issues related to accent for
philological criticism, it has to be said that Saussure establishes his law on pairings or
“couplaison” based on these verses. He therefore wants to see some coupling of paired letters.

At first, Saussure wanted to decipher a written law on the compensation of phonemes, that’s to
say, each phoneme would appear a couple of times in the verse. In the last verse for example,

Subigit omne Loucanam opsidesque abdoucit:

The sound ‘ouc’ appears twice (Loucanam, abdoucit)

The ‘d’ sound appears twice (opsidesque, abdoucit)

The’‘b sound appears twice (subigit, abdoucit) -it twice (subigit, abdoucit)

The short ‘I’appears twice (Loucanam, abdoucit)

The short ‘o’ appears twice (omne, opsides-)

The ‘n’ twice too (omne, Loucanam)

And so does the ‘m’ (omne, Loucanam)

To close off this law, Saussure talks about a law of matching or non-matching residues. In this
case, it is the ‘p’ in opsides that will match the ‘p’ in cepit of the previous verse
Taurasia Cisauma Samnio cepit.

Both shed their pairs in the corresponding verses but they compensate each other from one
verse to another.

This law on pairings leads him to write the following, “it is uncommonto achieve an absolute
pairing, it is asking for too much to expect all words to combine in such a way as to get to an
even number in two-thirds of the letters”.

Having said that, let’s have a look at the level of exigence – having used the word himself – that
Saussure reaches in an attempt to deduce laws.

Taurasia Cisauma Samnio c (long “e”)pit.

This, as we have already indicated, would be an anagrammatic verse as it contains the


complete name of Scipio.

Later, Saussure tries to see an anagrammatic sequence in vowels only which would recompose
the name Cornelius in the following verse:

“Mors perf(short “e”)cit tua ut essent”. But Saussure goes beyond the sequence and worries
that the ‘e’ is Cornelius is a long one and the one in ‘perfecit’a short one!!!!! (the remaining
vowels coincide with the vocalic quantity, long or short).

Saussure called this second anagrammatic sequence made only of vowels anaphony.

I am citing this comment as an example of the meticulous precision, verging on the incredible,
that Saussure handles. Suffice it to add that he intends to apply the same precision of internal
phonic lawsto all the poetry that he investigates????!!!

Saussure later abandoned this law of pairings for a more flexible one of diphones and triphones
albeit also of great restraint and limitation as we would see in his creative task. What finally
convinces him about the anagrammatic intentionality or hypogram of the authoris that there is
a forced declension which should have been ‘seromnem’ and not ‘omne’ to match Loucanam.
Saussure saw proof of the author’s quest for pairing in this forced declension. This would not
have been the case if the correct declension had been made. He discovers many archaic forms
that have been needlessly kept in a bid to maintain, as he saw it, the pairing among other
verses (a rather debatable fact as we could allege simple errors, often common with copyists).

It is curious that being a linguist of such stature – and I say this with all the due respect and care
you can imagine – he did not think of problems that palaeography a basic discipline within the
philological realm entail.

Our culture is in fact made up of constant errors by scribes and copyists to the extent of
shaping our vision and interpretation of civilization. Suffice it to remember the famous
evangelical sentence “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich
man to enter the kingdom of god” hails from an error as simple as the fact that camel in Greek
is written ηwith a long ‘e’ or ‘eta’ and rope -with‘iota’. The correct sentence
with the most logical meaning is “It is easier for a rope to pass through the eye of a needle than
for a rich man to enter the kingdom of god”. Someone must have made the mistake while
copying the Greek work and hence we have said camel for the past 2000 years. As a result,
Saussure’s hypothesis of intentional archaisms so that things add up sounds like a mixed bag
when they could in fact be credible errors and mistakes of the scribe. On the one hand,
Saussure’s obsessive precision stands out – I dare say – when he focuses on the vocalic quantity
and looks out for matching long and short vowels and on the other hand, the relative ease with
which deduces laws like the one about compensated residues or not.

Let’s revisit the concept of anagram but this time in the Saussurean sense.

Starobinski affirmed:

For Saussure, the poetic anagram is a totally conscious artifice in the hands of the verse
writer. The anagram is his most radical basis and not an accessory game for verse
versification. It is not a transposition of letters with major or minor alliteration. The poet, in
the composition of the verse, will set in motion the phonic material provided by the TOPIC-
WORD. The hypogram is the constant worry of the writer: a worry outside which he does not
think he has the right to write a single line”.
As we saw, for example, in Lucretius, Aphrodite or the aforementioned Scipio or Agamemnon in
the Iliad.

“Habit for any educated roman as well as plotter of his own anagrams and decipherer of those
by others, conscious author and accomplice reader”. (Saussure writes)

Well here we are before Saussure in his most euphoric phase, he is enthused about his great
intuition and has thrown himself on Latin texts. There are some verses of Marcial in one of his
epigrams to be specific and some fragments of the Aenead Book II which led him to write the
following to Meillet in the summer of 1906: “Eureka, I think I have discovered the secret of the
poetry of the classics”

I wish to point out before anything else that Los cahiers o Cuadrenos(some 117) in total are not
dated thus making it difficult to track the evolution of Saussurean thought since there are
several annotations in the margins which are not clear in terms of the moment of investigative
process. He also discards some criteria along the way while giving priority to others. As such, he
gradually abandons the laws of pairing and focuses on laws about diphones even though they
will not be simultaneous. I say this because Starobinski’s book leads to a bit of confusion by
attaching the same value to the two anagrammatic criteria at the same time. The investigative
process can best be followed in his correspondence with Meillet and Bally.

In a letter to Bally he insists that the anagram cannot be confused with the graphic artifice.
“The way I find it in Homer it is no more than homophony:

he therefore affirms that his final proof would come from LISTENING to the TEXT read aloud in such a
way that the ear WILL SAY ITS WORD, and in most cases will affirm that it has received an impression as
a whole, indeed invoking and remembering (this is important), the name or the word which causes it
and which commonly dominates the passage”. In a letter to Bally he says textually “I haven’t arrived
here out of the blue but I have arrived. Of all the things that I have just put forward, the one I hold to be
most certainly true now is that entire texts in Homer’s poems – and if not entire texts, one could see
which parts do not conform – REST ON A SECRET LAW, according to which vocal and consonant
repetition come in an absolutely fixed number depending on the TOPIC WORD or STICHWORT. A topic
word observed from verse to verse with admirable and total precision.

It could be said that the entire Homerian text is nothing but one continuous anagram.

Sliding off the anagram, the TOPIC WORD or WORDS that change every two verses or every two verses
and a half or every three verses and with utmost precision about the number of consonants, vowels and
hiatuses required in this space for the topic word.

It is therefore a question of a phonic world and not a graphic one. This represents an
importantqualitative leap in the investigation. It is about listening and not so much as finding from read
texts. This will lead him to the Vedas and the oral Germanic tradition.

This is why he expresses his gratitude to Bally in a letter in July 1906 – comprising 16 folios – the sending
of the Rigveda and comes to the conclusion that Vedic poetry is literally covered in anagrams. He
dedicates 26 of the notebooks to Vedic hymns when incidentally he had dedicated 18 to the Saturnian
hymns which had shown him the way.

But then he asks Meillet “to take charge of his (Saussure’s) ideas as it is almost impossible for the
originator of the idea to know if he is a victim of an illusion or there is really something truthful at the
bottom of the idea or maybe just half-truths”

Our interest lies in checking out this so-called hypogrammatic hypothesis in a classic text in Hinduism
which partakes in the Vedic essence and which by dint of its devotional spirit of constant invocation of
Krishna’s name through dialogue with his devout Arjuna meets the ideal conditions to prove Saussure
right. Of the 117 notebooks, he dedicates a total of 26 to the Vedas – more than he does to any other
form of literature. This is where our interest to confirm what is true about the Saussurean hypothesis
through direct contact with an original text in Sanskrit lies. We have seen the anagram as a simple
transposition of letters, a change in their order which gives us a new signifier with a new hidden
meaning. A change in the order of the monophones as per Saussurean terminology.

In contrast to the hypogram which involves taking as reference, anchor or starting point two sounds
or diphones from which we connect with another monophone or sound which then enables us to
reconstruct that topic word. It is the nuclear term which underpins the whole text. In our specific case,
KR and N or KS and N etc.

Divine sound

Insistence to keep pronunciation and the stress in the most precise manner possible has to do with
the belief that the power of the mantras lies in sound when pronounced. The Shakhas or Schools
therefore have a mission to preserve knowledge about the pronunciation of divine sounds known
originally as rishis. Parts of Vedic literature elucidate the use of sounds as a spiritual tool. It is claimed
that cosmic creation started with sound. “Through its pronunciation it got to the universe”
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.2.4. The Vedanta-Sutras also add that the final liberation also comes from
sound. The mantras or sacred sounds are used to seep into the sensual, mental and intellectual levels of
existence (all the lower strata of conscience) with the purpose of purification and spiritual
enlightenment. “With sonic vibration, one gets to be liberated” Vedanta-Sutra 4.2.2. Recent research
has shown that Vedic chants reduce the crime rate and to maintain a positive effect in a particular area,
frequent Vedic chants are recommended. From the ensuing video clip, the reader can delve deeper in
the understanding of what the text expounds.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD81SkrxdU

These charts serve to show the diphonic possibilities of the language while at the same time
highlighting the fact that it is not precisely guttural diphonic possibilities (the K que starts off
the hypogram) that are most referred to but rather the dental ones. This comment is mainly
due to doubt regarding the random possibilities that a language has where some sounds tend
to be more frequent than others.
Let’s go back to the previous charts to revisit the diphones and monophones of the topic Word
or hypogram that we shall follow in “the reconstruction of Osiris’ corpse in randomly chosen
verses.

Phonemes in Sanskrit from Krishna Transliteration


the hypogram

कृष्ण
कृ Kri diphone

ष Sha monophone

ण Na monophone

क्ष Kṣa diphone

Based on the criterion that the first verses of each of the 18 chapters of the Gita should enclose
diphones and monophones of the topic word in case there was any hypogrammatic intention, I
hereby offer some examples that could confirm the said hypothesis.
Absolutely all the first verses of each chapter enclose diphones and monophones just as other
internal verses do.
Here is a somewhat hazardous breaking down of some examples while maintaining the word
KRISHNA at the beginning of each chapter with the aim of making tracking easier. We should
bear in mind that according to Saussure, “old poetic composition took note of the succession
of certain phonemes by marking them with indications or showing their regularity with
coloured chips” Starobinski, 1971, 31 – 40.

कृष्ण Krishna

Chapter 1: Arjunaviṣāda (Arjuna’sdejection)


धृतराष्ट्रउवाच
धर्म क्षेत्रेकुरुक्षेत्रेसर्वे तायुयुत्सवः।
र्ार्काःपाण्डवाश्चैवककर्कुवमतसञ्जय॥१॥
Dhṛtarāṣṭrauvāca
Dharmakṣetrekurukṣetresamavetāyuyutsavaḥ|
Māmakāḥpāṇḍavāścaivakimakurvatasañjaya||1||
Dhṛtarāṣṭra (dhṛtarāṣṭraḥ) said (uvāca):
"(After) meeting (samavetāḥ) inKurukṣetra (kurukṣetre), (alsoknown
as) Dharmakṣetra(dharmakṣetre), full of longingfor a fight (yuyutsavaḥ), oh
Sañjaya (sañjaya), What (kim) (akurvata) myown (sons) (māmakāḥ) togetherwith (ca
eva) the"so-called" children ofPāṇḍu (pāṇḍavāḥ)"

Through simple tracking, we shall start checking how the monophonekwhich heads the
hypogram is the most repeated one thus confirming Saussure’s thesis that it is the initial
monophone that is most Heard in any text of a hypogrammatic nature and to a lesser degree
the sha and na are repeated thereby completing the topic word. Apart from the fact that it is
the diphonesks and kr that ‘upholster’, in the words of Saussure, all the verses that head the 18
chapters of the Gita (the same happens with internal ones), we have chosen some as simples.
This way we shall check to see what was valid for Saussure with the Rigveda applies to the Gita
with us.

I wish to point out again that this is an experiment and that Saussure never investigated The
Bhagavad Gita.

I equally point out that Kesava is an epithet for Krishna – among the 108 epithets he has –
which enclose the monophone k as well asKeshinusudhana-which later- is the epithet that
means destroyer of the demon Kesi.

Verse 29

कृष्ण Krishna
प्रकृतेर्ुमणसम्मूढाःसज्जन्तेर्ुणकर्मसु।
तानकृत्स्नकवदोर्न्दान्कृत्स्नकवन्नकवचालये त्॥२९॥
Prakṛterguṇasammūḍhāḥsajjanteguṇakarmasu|
Tānakṛtsnavidomandānkṛtsnavinnavicālayet||29||

"Those totally deceived (sammūḍhāḥ) by the ways (guṇa) ofPrakṛti (prakṛteḥ)1 are
hinged on(sajjante) the actions (karmasu) (carried out by the said) ways (guṇa). The
omniscient (kṛtsna-vit) should not agitate or perturb (navicālayet) these(tān) dim-
wits (mandān) that are not omniscient (a-kṛtsna-vidaḥ)"||29||
1 Prakṛtiis the fountain from which all material is produced. She has three ways: Sattva,

Rajas y Tamas.

CHAPTER IV: verses 15 and 16

कृष्ण Krishna

एवंज्ञात्वाकृतंकर्मपूवैरकपर्ुर्ुक्षुक ः।
कुरुकर्ैवतस्मात्त्वंपूवैःपू वमतरं कृतर््॥१५॥
Evaṁjñātvākṛtaṁkarmapūrvairapimumukṣubhiḥ|
Kuru karmaivatasmāttvaṁpūrvaiḥpūrvataraṁkṛtam||15||
"Knowing (me) (jñātvā) in this way (evam) also (api), the ancient --pūrvās--
(pūrvaiḥ) who desire freedom --mumukṣavas-- (mumukṣubhiḥ) did things --lit. "acción
realizada"-- (kṛtam karma)1. As a result (tasmāt), do (kuru... tvam) thing(s) (karma
eva) (just as they were) done (kṛtam) by the
ancestors(pūrvaiḥ) before(pūrvataram)"||15||

कृष्ण Krishna

कर्मण्यकर्मयःपश्येदकर्म कणचकर्मयः।
सबुद्धिर्ान्मनुष्येषुसयु क्तःकृत्स्नकर्म कृत्॥१८॥
Karmaṇyakarmayaḥpaśyedakarmaṇi ca karma yaḥ|
Sa buddhimānmanuṣyeṣusayuktaḥkṛtsnakarmakṛt||18||
"(Is) endowed with understanding–he is a sage-- (buddhimān) among human
beings (manuṣyeṣu) he (saḥ) who (yaḥ... yaḥ) witnesses (paśyet) inaction (akarma) in
the action (karmaṇi) and (ca) action (karma) in inaction (akarmaṇi).
He (saḥ) hasreachead Yoga or Union –he is aYogī-- (yuktaḥ) (and) amaker (kṛt) of all
(kṛtsna) actions (karma)"||18||
in sin (kilbiṣam)"||21||

BY WAY OF CONCLUSION.

In response to the question which we started off with i.e. The hypogram, conscious intentionality? I am
daring to give an answer in two in one, that is to say, yes and no. I dare say there might have been a
hypogram that would result from the creative intentionality as we have seen and which I believe I have
proved. Owing to the very nature of some languages, this creative intentionality would be a lot more
feasible. This fact is however not an impediment nor a contradiction to the fact that the very structure
of a language,may providewithout any conscious intentionality, random combinations which could be
read and interpreted in hypogrammatic coding. It could be purely statistical combination. In my opinion,
Saussure lived an encounter which what he called hypogram as an encounter with a “Reality” in a
lacanian sense of the word which he tried to symbolise and systematise into laws for three long years.
He however did not reach any definitive conclusions due to his absolutist approach. Let’s not forget all
the correspondence with Meillet where he enthusiastically claims to have discovered the laws governing
ancient poetry or that all of Homerian poetry was indeed hypogrammaticalised. In a way, Saussure
propound a delirium which erudite as it might have been, was still a delirium from his privileged
relationship with the signifier and with the languages he knew. In drawing an analogy as food for
thought, it is if an extraordinarily ductile and malleable material allowed natural agents like wind and
water to create whimsical shapes in one swoop which would later lend themselves with a certain
meaning. This is the case with stains, minerals or even the karstic morphologies like those of the
Enchanted City. This malleable and ductile quality would undoubtedly facilitate man’s moulding hand.
But then to make a conclusive and forceful axiomatic claim that any hazardous form or shape is the
product of an intentional hand is to say the least excessive.

The very ability of the material would be something from within it. Since language is a living organism
subjected to the consequences of an automaton, it is bound to take on these characteristics. Language
or some languages must function this way. It is obvious that poetic language is the most prone to
hyprogrammatic fate given that alliterations, repetitions, rhymes and other rhetorical figures facilitate
this hypogrammatic dimension par excellence. The ancient kavis or hindu poets must have known about
this dimension of the hypogram and hence Saussure’s interest in Vedic hymns and its use in The
Bhagavad Gita.It is most likely that the ancient Vedic “listeners” did know about this phonic dimension
in the name of the Deity and even more so as it did not exist in written form. This “listening” ability must
have got lost over time leaving behind only the reiterated repetition of the mantras and hymns. It is
therefore relevant to close this run with those words by Lacan which could be summarised as: Who are
we to deny the existence of the deities of ancient people. What happens is that we no longer hear them.
Here is a textual quote:

[….], ancient people knew about all sorts of things, and on occasion, messages from the gods. And why
would they have to get it wrong? They must have done something with these messages from the gods,
besides [….], we cannot rule out that these messages still exist. The thing is that we do not care that
much, we are not interested in the fabric that encloses these messages, the network that something
possibly gets stuck to. Maybe the voice of the gods still echoes but for a long time now our hearing has
returned, as far as they are concerned, to their original state. We all know that they are carved out not
to hear”. Seminar 11. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Class

4. Network of Signifiers. 5th February, 1964.


BIBLIOGRAFÍA
Bhagavad Gita de acuerdo a Gandhi, Editorial Kier, Buenos Aires, 1986.
CALVERA, L., Las fuentes del hinduismo, Ed. Dédalo, Buenos Aires, 1979.
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DELAVAN PERRY, E., A Sanskrit Primer, Cosmos Publications, New Delhi, 1977.
DOLÇ, M., Introducción epigramas selectos de Marcial, Bosch, Barcelona, 1964.
DOMÍNGUEZ REY, A., El gramma poético, germen precientífico del lenguaje, Anthropos Ed,
Barcelona,2014.
ESTÉBANEZ CALDERÓN, D., Diccionario de términos literarios, Ed. Alianza, Madrid, 2001.
FERNÁNDEZ M. en ABC 1988.
GERSHON, S., Inroducción a la cabalá, Siglo XXI, 1978.
LACAN, J., La instancia de la letra en Escritos 1, Siglo XXI, Madrid, 1997.
LACAN, J., Seminario 11, Los cuatro conceptos fundamentales del psicoanálisis. Clase 4.
De la red de significantes, 5 febrero de 1964, Paidós, 1995.
MACDONELL, A., A Sanskrit Grammar for students, Motilal Banarsidass, New Delhi, 1985.
MANTILLA ORTIZ, C., La declinación sánscrita, Edit. Cuesta, Valladolid, 1904.
RODRÍGUEZ F. R., Semiótica del anagrama, Publicaciones de la U. de Alicante, 1998.
SAUSSURE, F., Curso de lingüística general, Alianza Editorial, Textos, Madrid, 1991.
STAROBINSKI, J., Las palabras bajo las palabras, Gedisa, Barcelona, 1996.
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NOTA
1 ) Los fragmentos de la correspondencia entre Saussure y sus discípulos Meillet y Bally han
sido citados siguiendo la tesis de Rául Rodríguez Ferrándiz, Semiótica del anagrama, Alicante,
1998.
2) Ferdinand de Saussure comenzó su investigación en 1906 y la continuó hasta los primeros
meses de 1909, precisa y curiosamente mientras dictaba el Curso de lingüística general.
Estos cuadernos, clasificados por Robert Godel, se encuentran en la Biblioteca Pública y
Universitaria de Ginebra. Según Starobinski (Gedisa 1996) estarían clasificados del siguiente
modo:
Ms.fr. 3962. Versos saturnios (17 cuadernos y un fajo).
Ms. fr. 3963. Anagramas: Homero (24 cuadernos).
Ms.fr. 3964. Anagramas: Virgilio (19 cuadernos), Lucrecio (3 cuadernos), Séneca y Horacio
(1 cuaderno), Ovidio (3 cuadernos).
Ms.fr. 3965. Anagramas: autores latinos (12 cuadernos).
Ms.fr. 3966. Anagramas: Carmina epigaphica (12 cuadernos).
Ms. fr. 3967. Hipogramas: Ángel Policiano (11 cuadernos).
Ms. fr.3968. Hipogramas: traducciones de Thomas Johnson (13 cuadernos).
Ms. fr. 3969.Hipogramas: Rosati, Pascoli (tablas escritas en grandes hojas).
Hay que agregar 26 cuadernos bajo el epígrafe La métrica védica (Ms.fr. 3960 y 3961),
sin embargo los mismos giran sobre la fonética y no sobre la métrica.
Curiosamente es éste el mayor número de cuadernos y están dedicados a la
hipogramatización sánscrita.

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