Comments on Are questions on linguistics of "languages" like music, math, or coding on-topic?
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Are questions on linguistics of "languages" like music, math, or coding on-topic?
NB: I know very little about linguistics.
What is a "language" that questions about it would be on-topic here?
- Encyclopedia Britannica defines a language as "a system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express themselves."
- OED defines a language as (1) "the method of human communication;" (2) "a system of communication used by a particular country or community."
- Merriam-Webster defines a language as (1a) "the words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them used and understood by a community;" (1b) "a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings."
- Wikipedia defines a language as "a structured system of communication."
When it comes to spoken, written, or sign-based communication, all of these definitions would seem to agree that a formal system based on such methods of communication would be considered a language. But what about the linguistics of math? Of instrumental music? Of coding?
To take music as an example, instrumental sheet music can be described fairly easily in linguistic terms:
- Spoken and written languages have letters or groups of letters as its morphemes, and sheet music has notes. Similar to how some languages are tonal, wherein the same vowel can inflect different words by its pitch or change in pitch, one might consider the length of the note akin to phonemes and its pitch akin to tonemes.
- Syntax refers to the rules of sentence structure. While there's no parallel to word order in music, if we compare a single measure to a sentence, syntax would refer to the limits on how notes can be arranged therein, based on the given time signature.
- Morphology referring to the study of word formation would imply almost no morphology in music; however such a feature is certainly not unique among languages (take Classical Chinese as an example, where syntax and free morphemes convey meaning). (Due to the loose nature of terms like "phrases" and "verses," which are mostly up to artistic intent, I would rather make these comparisons with little morphology than compare a measure to a word with the result of little syntax.)
- Based on the principle of mutual intelligibility, variant instruments could be considered different dialects of the same language (or perhaps separating pitched and unpitched instruments into two separate languages). Then regular dialect linguistics would apply in translating between instruments.
With all that said, would questions about applying linguistic principles to music, math, coding, or other "nonstandard" languages be on-topic?
Sample questions:
- Syntax of music: The way one might ask about how placement of verbs or nouns affects the syntax of an English sentence, one might ask how changing time signature affects the syntax of sheet music. "3/4 and 6/8 music are written identically – what is the difference between the two time signatures?"
- Syntax of coding: The way one might ask about word order in an ordinary spoken or written language, one might ask about word order in a coding language.
Really it's orthography where I can imagine more sample questions arising, asking of mathematical or musical notation.
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This site is young and asking some questions and seeing how they end up received is a good way to judge what kind of coverage can be found here.
That said, questions entirely disconnected from a mainstream interpretation of what are "languages" or "linguistics", questions unlikely to be studied by too many "linguists" or at least tangentially occurring in university curricula of "general linguistics", perhaps aren't ideal for such testing, because to get a meaningful answer here, let alone a transparent consensus regarding the relative quality (popularity) of any submitted answers, then becomes a matter of luck.
All four definitions listed in the OP allude to there being not just a structured system, but also some "meaning" behind expressions constructed upon the structure studied. (All of the terms "symbol", "sign", "communication", "understanding" require that the language not just exists as a structure, but also that it carries a meaning that can be communicated through the language.) The most general study of such systems, i.e., a system of signs with meanings, would normally be called "semiotics", of which "linguistics" would be just a subarea.
"Music" does not seem to me to be primarily a method of communication. A composer can have a meaning in mind, a performer another meaning, and a listener may thoroughly enjoy the performance without working through a conventional system of symbols to find out what the intended meaning was. We would hardly ever say that the listener enjoyed themselves but "that their perception was incorrect". Music can be structurally and functionally very deep, be interwoven with sung or other scenic language, and offer lots of excursions into semiotics, but that does not make all of musicology a subfield of semiotics, and even less of linguistics.
"Math" as I understand it seems to have the opposite deficiency preventing us calling it a language (or a language family). It has a meaning independent of its expression. There are languages capable of expressing mathematical ideas, one of them being English. A mathematician might ask: "What is the (current or original) meaning of `given' in `given an object x'?" and that would be a linguistic question. However it would be a valid question for this site because it's about English (as used by the community of mathematicians) and not primarily about math itself.
Mathematics can also be expressed in a number of formalized languages, including languages whose syntax and expressivity is extremely limited, such as propositional logic. Another example of languages with strictly limited expressivity are programming languages. While these types of languages can arguably be understood to meet the definitions of a "language" as listed in the OP[1], and indeed the study of formal languages has a certain level of resonance with mainstream linguistics, including some of the terminology used, it's still the case that the scientific field most successful at analyzing these formal languages tends to be mathematics rather that traditional linguistics.
If an example will help, a question about Sanskrit or Esperanto would typically be on topic, a question about Fortran or the Zermelo-Fraenkel formalism would typically be off topic. Why? We think that humans have an inborn capacity for learning a language, which is crucial for individual human development. This site focuses on that particular device of human communication. A native speaker of Sanskrit or Esperanto is at least in principle possible, while a native speaker of Fortran is not.
To conclude, "applying linguistic principles" to this or that matter is only on topic for this site if that subject matter is part of a language or of how language works. A clearly formulated question might elucidate such a connection, or inquire about a specific connection, but the connection should perhaps not be taken for granted just because something is a "formally structured system" and "used by humans".
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Least of them the quoted Wikipedia one, unless a single sentence is left artificially extracted from an entire wiki page plus its corresponding disambiguation page which together can be interpreted as the "current Wikipedia consensus" of what a language is with much more accuracy than a single short sentence can convey. ↩︎
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