ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the devastation of form that is obvious, and some of its inroads. The divorce between meaning and form has been called Duality. As one linguist puts it, 'Duality freed concept and symbol from each other to the extent that change could now modify either one without affecting the other'. It is the object of most linguist's historical investigations, and is the evil spirit that the shaman would cast out, for he regards change as corruption. Linguists may not take the myth of Babel seriously, but they have to take seriously the multiplicity of languages on earth, and try to account for it, just as social scientists have to account for its consequences - the lack of communication and disruption of cooperation that the myth symbolizes so well. The germ of confusion was the very quality of language that conferred its magic: the reduction of symbols to signs.
