Linguistics. From Aristotle to Computational Linguistics

What is linguistics? What does this science deal with, what problems does it face? This book tells about the history of linguistics from ancient times to the present and shows how 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, embark on expeditions into the jungle, and write computer programs? How linguistic theories emerged and how they help solve practical tasks: teaching languages, developing writing systems, creating algorithms for machine translation. The readers of the book are people who are distant from linguistics, but want to understand how and why people study their language.