Saussure and the Brazilian ‘scientific grammar’ (1880–1930)

ABSTRACT Right from his earliest studies on the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), E. F. K. Koerner consistently maintained that Saussure proposed ideas in agreement with, or in response to, the intellectual climate of his time. So much so, that for Koerner, Saussure’s real value lies more in his capacity to synthesise the ideas that were circulating at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, than in being the first to advance certain concepts, perceived as innovative by many of his later readers (cf. Koerner (1971) 1973; 1988; 2020). The present paper follows the same reasoning by asking what the first reference to Saussure, in 1919, made by the Brazilian philologist Manuel Said Ali Ida (1861–1953), meant within Brazilian philological and linguistic circles, at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. How could we interpret Said Ali’s reference to Saussure? In this paper, I argue that Said Ali’s gramatical writings synthesise clearly and consistently what was already ‘in the air’ in a fragmented and sometimes misunderstood way of applying the then-new scientific historical-comparative paradigm to Portuguese language history and description.