I
will try to compare natural human languages and mathematical language
in order to try to answer the question '''Is Maths really a
language?' This is a very big question which will require a lot of
writing and my purpose is not to make you feel bored but to fire your
curiosity about the topic, and after that you will carry on exploring
by yourself. That's why I will do this comparison briefly.
Maths
is really very often called a language and it is true that Maths is
used in many other areas of human knowledge as a tool. Remember
engineering, science, geography and almost every other area, they use
something from Maths. It looks like the Maths language exists to
serve others by offering them a lot – arithmetic,
statistical graphical ways to represent certain knowledge,
probability, which is part of a risk assessment, geometry is
everywhere in building business and algebra is just sometimes so
annoying with her constant effort to find ‘X’ in our lives. But
this is what we are doing very often in our lives – we are
detectives who are trying to solve our own little mysteries. So, we
agree, Maths is present in every aspect in our personal and
professional lives.
What
is a natural human language then? By 'natural' I mean languages which
are spoken by people and which develop through the centuries.
They could be official state languages or a dialect, which is a
language which is spoken locally and it doesn't have official state
status. There are more than 6000 languages in the world and most of
them are disappearing, mainly due to migration. Some of the languages
are big – many people use them, such English, Arabic, Russian,
Spanish and some others. Some are little and some of them are
micro-languages. I spent some time of my university career doing
research about one very little Slavic micro-language – the Upper
Sorbian language and I even wrote two books about this language. It
is spoken in Eastern Germany and it is a disappearing language (only
around 50 000 people are speaking it), people are bilingual – they
know German as well. Their main cultural place is called
Bautzen. It is 60 km from Dresden. They have a Sorbian institute
there in Bautzen and I have been there many times to do research
about my books.
What
is the definition of a natural human language? We want to compare
Maths language with human languages so we need to have a starting
point and we need to know that the things we are comparing are
comparable.
