metaphornik:
Music is like a natural language in some respects and very much unlike one in others. Here are some suggested similarities and dissimilarities.
Music is like (a) language in that:
- It can be described through a system of rules that operate on a limited vocabulary
- It combines small building blocks into large components that are like words, phrases, sentences and text
- It is recursively expressive
- It has dual articulation in that smaller segments like scales are organized independently of large segments like movements
- It has phraseology and idioms
- It can cross-reference between compositions (texts)
- It can communicate emotion both segmentally (sequences of notes) and suprasegmentally (expression, emphasis, etc.)
- It has styles, genres and dialects
- It can be acquired and learned
- It is culturally conditioned
Music is NOT like (a) language in that:
- It cannot be used to directly communicate propositional meaning
- It has radically smaller set of building blocks and rules for their combination than language
- It does not have internal instruments of disambiguation
- It can only be universally acquired in the most rudimentary sense (i.e. everybody can hum a tune but very few people can play an instrument)
- There is much a greater difference between receptive and productive competence
- There is much greater variability in individuals’ ability to produce music beyond the most trivial
- Much more of the production process requires cooperation among individuals
- It is much more limited in its dialogic potential (i.e. is most often used for a one way communication between few producers and more recipients or joint co-production of producer/recipients)
Similar lists could be constructed for other communicative systems where people talk about the ‘language of X’.
I like these lists a lot because it’s a common analogy for people to talk about any way of communicating as a language, and yet not all ways of communicating are actually equally robust and fully-featured, which we sometimes miss when we get too caught up in “language of X” analogies.
That’s how you can tell apart, for example, sign languages and body language or dance: a sign language has all the features of any other language, it’s just in a different medium, whereas body language or dance is good at communicating, say, emotion, but bad at communicating abstract things. It’s like the difference between writing and drawing: you can write or sign your opinions on existentialism or your plans for the weekend concretely and with no potential for misunderstanding, but if you’ve ever played pictionary or charades, you know that many things become a lot harder to communicate when you don’t already have a shared system of abstract symbols.
There are certainly things that music, dance, and visual art are better at communicating than speaking, signing, or writing, but there are also certain common features of speaking, signing, and writing, which they don’t share with forms of art, and that allow us to talk about all three as language in a way that’s more similar to each other than to a form of art that shares the same medium.
I just shovel salt into my mouth like some kind of alien monster, so 
An unforced mistake of The Soviet Union: to condemn the computer as a capitalist tool and 
