But if you had a mind like that of Ferdinand de Saussure, would you worry much about whether or not you had a royal ancestor?

Each of us may be a descendant of a queen or king (by whatever name) of something.

An interesting article. Two things: Vladimir Nabokov writes in his memoir Speak, Memory about his synesthesia where he associates different letters with colors; Saussure also left MSS behind in which he found numerous anagrammatic patterns in Latin poetry. (There is a book about the latter translated in '79 called Words Upon Words: the Anagrams of Ferdinand de Saussure by Jean Starobinski.)

Interesting , but quite a long and not too easy read.
Structuralist and poststructuralist French philosophy
has put a heavy mark on postmodern and actual visual arts. Making it all so often unnecessarily obscure.

On colors:
Quote:"Photism, a word James himself was the first to use in English, had been a popular subject in German and French psychological research since the start of the 1880s. None of the studies mentions the poem “Voyelles”, written in 1871–2 by the young Rimbaud, even though these psychologists were scholar-scientists who kept up with literature."

Vowels by Rimbaud.