Linguistics. From Aristotle to Computational Linguistics

What is linguistics? What problems does this science address? This book tells the history of linguistics from ancient times to the present and shows how the science tries to answer three main questions related to language – how it is... structured, how it changes over time, and how it functions.
Many even educated people think that linguists are polyglots who simply know many languages. This misconception is quite understandable – the expression "to study a language" can be interpreted in different ways but has nothing to do with reality. Vladimir Alpatov's book explains what linguists actually do and what interests them. Why do they read ancient manuscripts, go on expeditions into the jungle, and write computer programs? How did linguistic theories emerge, and how do they help solve practical tasks: teaching languages, developing writing systems, creating machine translation algorithms? The readers of the book are people far from linguistics but wishing to learn how and why people study their language.