Meaning has been called the ‘holy grail’ not only of linguistics, but also of philosophy and neuroscience.  Of particular interest to...

The conventional belief in modern linguistics is that the relationship of sound to meaning in languages is fundamentally arbitrary. This assumption is false and as a result little or no progress has been made uncovering the true nature of languages.

Since it was first recognized that widely separated languages in time and space can share strong similarities in their lexicons, morphology and sound correspondences, it has been widely assumed that such similarities must be due to common descent.