Over the ages man has wondered what lan guage is, how it is constructed, how one's moth er 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 ac cumulation 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 stu dents 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 7What Semiotics Has to Say 9Languages and Codes 41People, Things, Words 78Numbers and Language 104The Linguistic Clock 127The Universal Code of Science 149The Tower of Babel 173Machine Translation 199Sounds and Meaning 225Space Linguistics 255Subject Index  278Name Index 283