From Chomsky’s early search for rules to today’s learning machines, this essay traces how linguistics tried — and failed — to explain meaning through structure. The story leads from semantic markers to Large Language Models, showing how the statistical approach once dismissed as mechanical has achieved a sophistication that mirrors the very act of writing itself.
From William Lily’s Rudimenta Grammatices to Geoffrey Hinton’s neural networks, this essay traces five centuries of inquiry into language — from moral discipline to scientific method to artificial intelligence — and asks why linguistics, the study of language itself, never solved the question that machines finally answered.