Linguistics has become a very successful science - in a purely practical sense. Machines are now trained to translate with an amazingly high degree of accurateness any text of almost any language into that of any other. But machines do so without any knowledge of meaning - which, however, constitutes the very core of language. What science has gained in a practical way, it has lost in understanding. We have to go back to the Principles of Language, that is, to the basic question: How mental images (meaning) are transformed into acoustic sounds (form) in order to understand both Law and Variety in Human Language.
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