YAzykoznanie: Ot Aristotelya do komp'yuternoy lingvistiki
Vladimir Alpatov
What is linguistics or linguistics? What does this science do, what problems does it face? This book tells the history of linguistics from ancient times to the present and shows how science tries to answer the three main questions related to language - how it works, 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 "learn a language" can be interpreted in different ways, but has nothing to do with reality. Vladimir Alpatov's book tells what linguists actually do and what interests them. Why do they read old manuscripts, go on expeditions to the jungle and write computer programs. How linguistic theories appeared and how they help to solve practical problems: to teach languages, to develop scripts, to create machine translation algorithms. The readers of the book are people who are far from linguistics, but who want to know how and why people learn their language.
