How can meaning reside in a sound?

Today we are able to speak/wrtie/text/communicate on the autobahn of the information superhighway.

The structure of what you and I say when we speak has developed over several millennia in which the written word has been a primary medium of cultural transmission.

Yet for for hundreds of thousands of years before that the main medium of information transfer from generation to generation was the well-beaten path of word of mouth.

So Language was already a highly refined biological product, complete with all its modern appurtenances,

an accessory associated with a particular activity

long before writing was invented.

And now we don’t just hear language; we see it, neatly broken into words separated by spaces, strung out in speaking order across visual space.

But why are some sequences of words better than others, and how many dimensions of comparison are there? Some utterances are false but beautiful, others are true but ugly or boring, and still others are not even up to being true or false – they are nonsensical or incoherent, or ungrammatical. How has this come to pass?

　
Grammar and logic and rhetoric and poetics all took their proper places as parts of the systematic analysis of language, but it was only in the 20th century that the various phenomena of language began to come into focus. And once that happened, linguistics was ready for its Newton, or its Einstein: Noam Chomsky. .

The most striking discovery Chomsky made was that we were misled by the view of language we got through the prisms of writing. Words are not just beads of sound strung together in a line, with tiny gaps of silence in between. The processes that generate the sentences we speak and the processes that parse or analyse the sentences we hear have a beautiful structure inaudible to the naked ear and invisible to the ill-clothed eye of the literate speaker. It is the structure of a tree, (a jaded metaphor) with a trunk and branches, not a string of pearls.

Hmm, no wonder Chomsky has been superseded as a linguistic theorist.

And we return to the question, how can a sound have meaning?  You tell me.