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.

posted over 3 years ago

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3y ago

DonielF‭

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