In this post, we will see the book Sounds and Signs by A. Kondratov.
About the book
Over the ages man has wondered what language is, how it is constructed, how one’s mother tongue differs from the languages of other peoples, and how the language of human beings differs from the signal cries of animals, and how our everyday speech differs from other media of communication in human society.
Thinking on these problems gave birth to linguistics, the science of the laws of language. Methods of investigating language improved with the development of linguistics and the accumulation of facts and knowledge. Today the latest tool is in the form of numbers and exact measures. Mathematical statistics and the theory of information, probability theory and mathematical logic, computers and sign theory are more and more coming to the aid of students of language.
That is what our story is about.
The book was translated from the Russian by George Yankovsky and was first published by Mir in 1979.
Contents
Introduction 7
What Semiotics Has to Say 9
Languages and Codes 41
People, Things, Words 78
Numbers and Language 104
The Linguistic Clock 127
The Universal Code of Science 149
The Tower of Babel 173
Machine Translation 199
Sounds and Meaning 225
Space Linguistics 255
Subject Index 278
Name Index 283
Mir Books 