Swift and the Fatal Law: The Day Saussure Visited Lagado
Anyone who thinks he can construct a language not subject to change, which posterity must accept as it is, would be like a hen hatching a duck’s egg”.
— Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
Introduction
Among the many curious inventions described in Gulliver's Travels, few are more memorable than the linguistic reforms proposed at the Academy of Lagado. Gulliver visits a school of languages where three professors are engaged in a serious discussion about improving communication. Their solution is radical. Since words are merely names for things, why not abolish words altogether and communicate by carrying the objects themselves?
The proposal has one obvious drawback. As Swift explains, a person engaged in extensive affairs would be obliged to carry a correspondingly larger collection of objects. The consequence is delightfully absurd: the more learned the scholar, the heavier the burden upon his back.
The scene is often read as a satire of Enlightenment rationalism, and rightly so. Yet it becomes even more interesting when placed beside another text written by Swift himself. Fourteen years before Gulliver's Travels, he published A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), a serious essay advocating linguistic reform.
At first glance, the satirist and the reformer appear to be different people. A closer look suggests otherwise.
The Professors of Lagado and the Dream of Perfect Communication
The reformers of Lagado begin from an apparently reasonable assumption. If words merely designate things, then words are unnecessary intermediaries. Why speak of a chair when one can simply point to a chair? Why utter the name of an object when the object itself is available?
Swift's genius lies in pushing this logic to its conclusion.
A geologist discussing the Earth's formation would require a wagonload of rocks, minerals, and fossils. An agronomist delivering a speech on agriculture might need several assistants to transport the seeds and farming tools required for public debate. Intellectual distinction becomes a physical inconvenience.
The comedy works because the proposal reveals a hidden weakness in a familiar theory of language. The professors treat speech as a collection of labels attached to pre-existing realities. Once this assumption is accepted, replacing labels with objects seems almost sensible.
The joke is not merely about eccentric scholars. It is about a conception of language itself. The professors imagine that linguistic difficulties can be solved through a sufficiently rational redesign of communication. Language appears as a tool that can be reconstructed according to logical principles if only one is bold enough to abandon convention.
Swift exposes the absurdity of the proposal by taking that confidence seriously. Yet, as we shall see, the satirist was not entirely free from a comparable faith in linguistic management.
Swift the Reformer
Indeed, Swift was not always content to mock linguistic schemes. In 1712 he addressed a proposal to the Earl of Oxford calling for measures to preserve and regulate English.
His programme had three principal aims.
First, the language should be corrected. Swift complained about fashionable slang, abbreviations, careless expression, and what he regarded as unnecessary innovations.
Second, it should be improved. He hoped to encourage elegance, clarity, and good literary practice.
Third, and most importantly, language should be ascertained. In eighteenth-century usage, the term meant fixed, settled, and stabilized.
Swift feared linguistic change. He worried that future generations might struggle to understand contemporary authors and statesmen. The fate of great works seemed uncertain if English continued to evolve. Literature, history, and political achievement all appeared vulnerable to the passage of time.
The irony is difficult to miss. The author who laughed at linguistic projectors was advancing a linguistic project of his own.
The difference, of course, was that Swift did not wish to redesign English. He wished to preserve it. The professors of Lagado dreamed of a transparent universal language; Swift dreamed of protecting an existing one.
Yet beneath this difference of aims lies a deeper similarity. Both projects assume that language can be directed by deliberate intervention. The professors seek to reconstruct it according to reason; Swift seeks to stabilize it through institutional authority. One programme is revolutionary, the other conservative, but both rest upon the conviction that language can be governed.
It is precisely this assumption that Ferdinand de Saussure would challenge two centuries later.
A Visitor from Geneva
For Saussure, language is neither a nomenclature nor a monument.
It is not a nomenclature because words are not simply labels attached to pre-existing things. Meaning arises from relations within a system of differences. Nor is language a monument preserved by guardians and administrators. It exists only through the collective activity of speakers.
This principle applies even to artificial languages.
During the nineteenth century, many reformers believed that a rationally designed language such as Esperanto might escape the irregularities of ordinary speech. Saussure disagreed. The moment an invented system enters social life, it becomes subject to historical change.
He illustrates the point with a memorable comparison. Creating a language, he suggests, resembles placing a duck's egg beneath a hen. The egg may have been introduced artificially, but once the duckling hatches, it develops according to its own nature. Its subsequent life no longer depends upon the intentions of whoever arranged the experiment.
The same is true of language.
An invented language begins changing as soon as people start using it. Pronunciations shift. Meanings drift. New expressions appear. Regional varieties emerge. The creator loses control.
Saussure describes this inevitability as la loi fatale—the "fatal law" according to which every language, once adopted by a community, enters a process of historical transformation. No linguistic system can exempt itself from this condition because change does not arrive from outside. It is generated from within the social life of language itself.
Why Both Projects Fail
Seen from a Saussurean perspective, the professors of Lagado and Jonathan Swift become unexpected companions.
The former sought to redesign language according to logic; the latter hoped to preserve it against the erosions of time. One programme was revolutionary, the other conservative, yet both rested upon a similar conviction: that language could be directed by sufficiently intelligent individuals.
Saussure rejected this assumption. The reformers underestimated the complexity of linguistic life, while Swift overestimated the possibility of stabilizing it. Language belongs neither to inventors nor to academies. It is sustained by countless speakers whose collective activity continually reshapes it.
More fundamentally, linguistic change is not the result of negligence, corruption, or poor administration. It follows from the very nature of language. Because signs exist only within a social system, their values are constantly reproduced and modified through use. No authority stands outside this process. The moment a language is spoken by a community, it enters history and becomes subject to transformation.
No decree can permanently halt this movement because change is not an accident of language but one of its defining conditions. The fatal law operates equally upon artificial languages, regulated languages, and ordinary languages. The creator eventually loses control, and the guardian discovers that there is nothing permanent to guard.
Conclusion
One is tempted to imagine a final visit to the Academy of Lagado. The professors are still struggling beneath mountains of objects, while nearby sits Jonathan Swift drafting regulations intended to preserve English for posterity. Into this scene walks Ferdinand de Saussure.
To the professors he announces that language is not simply a list of names attached to pre-existing things. To Swift he explains that English cannot be fixed forever. Neither side receives encouraging news.
Yet the lesson is not pessimistic. The vitality of language depends precisely upon its resistance to control. It survives because it changes and remains useful because speakers continually adapt it to new circumstances.
The professors of Lagado sought to eliminate words in order to achieve direct reference. Swift sought to preserve words in order to secure perfect continuity. Both dreams depend upon the hope that language might somehow escape history. Saussure's lesson is that it cannot.
History appears to have sided with the Swiss linguist.
Related Post
The Language Reformers of Lagado: Swift and the Myth of Linguistic Transparency
https://derridaforlinguists.blogspot.com/2026/06/blog-post_409.htmlReferences
Saussure, F. de. (2011). Course in General Linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1916)
Swift, J. (1712). A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue.
Swift, J. (2008). Gulliver's Travels. Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1726)
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