Linguistics Is A Science, Not One Of The Humanities 語言學是一門科學，並不屬於人文
This #spectrograph is part of an #acoustics and #neuroscience based way to master Chinese #tones. The pitch display correlates very well with GR Tonal Spelling, a Chinese government #romanization promulgated in 1928 that is still used in Taiwan. Within rhyme groups, each tone has its own mnemonic spelling, a wonderful tool to help foreigners recognize and remember #Mandarin tones:
Linguistics As Science
In a recent post (https://steemit.com/science/@wentong-syhhae/can-we-squeeze-out-a-place-for-linguistics-in-the-steemstem-community), I pointed out that unlike the US, in Europe linguistics is accepted as a science.
Cognitive linguistics (http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/LangIdeo/Peeters/Peeters.html) has intimate connections with research on brain function (neuroscience).
Corpus linguistics makes extensive use of computational techniques to reach systematic conclusions about large bodies of text.
Articulatory phonetics focuses on the anatomy and physiology of the vocal tract, and acoustic phonetics makes extensive use of spectrography and mathematics (fourier transforms) to analyze sound waves.
Syntax and semantics make use of experimental techniques, as this explanation of child syntax makes clear (neurolinguistics):
Linguists Need a Steem Home
On a more personal note, as a former biology major, many of my language posts have a science aspect, as in my recent posts on the Chinese words for insects and other creepy-crawlies (sorry for the technical jargon ;-)
The way Steemit has evolved, there doesn't seem to be any clearcut home for linguistics and language learning posts. However, I think I have made a good case for linguistics as a niche within science (more than just biology, chemistry and physics), and thus language learning posts also deserve to receive the benefit of the doubt as a subniche of linguistics.
I've done this survey in the past, and the results are always depressingly the same. A look at today's trending tags shows that there is not even one single tag specifically devoted to language learning or linguistics.
Lack of Relevant Steem Tags
aceh, adventure, africa, altcoin, amazing, anarchy, animal, animalphotography, animals, anime, architecturalphotography, art, beautiful, beauty, beer, bescouted, beyondbitcoin, bitcoin, bitconnect, bitshares, blockchain, blog, btc, business, busy, bwphotocontest, cannabis, cars, castellano, cat, cats, celestialchallenge, cervantes, chainbb-general, charlesfuchs, christian-trail, christianity, christmas, cn, coffee, coinkorea, colorchallenge, colourfulphotography, comedy, community, conspiracy, contest, cooking, creative, creativity, crypto, crypto-news, cryptocurrencies, cryptocurrency, culture, curation, design, deutsch, dlive, dlive-broadcast, dmania, dog, dogs, drawing, dsound, dtube, education, english, entertainment, eos, esteem, ethereum, family, fashion, fiction, film, finance, fitness, flower, flowers, food, foodphotography, football, fr, free, freedom, freesteem, freewrite, fun, funny, game, games, gaming, gardening, giveaway, gold, goldenhourphotography, happy, health, help, history, homesteading, hot, howto, humor, ico, india, indonesia, inspiration, introduce, introducemyself, introduceyourself, introduction, investing, investment, ita, japanese, jjangjjangman, jokes, joy, kr, kr-event, kr-gazua, kr-newbie, kr-travel, kr-writing, ksi, landscapephotography, life, lifestyle, litecoin, lol, love, macrophotography, marijuana, markboss, market, meme, memechallenge, mining, minnowbooster, minnowsunite, minnowsupport, minnowsupportproject, money, monochromemonday, monomad, motivation, movie, movies, muksteem, music, myanmar, natural, nature, new, news, nigeria, norway, nsfw, openmic, painting, people, persian, philippines, philosophy, photo, photofeed, photography, photos, picture, poem, poetry, polish, politics, post, promo-steem, psychology, pt, quote, quotes, recipe, religion, resteem, review, ripple, ru, sbdtothemoon, science, sevendaybnwchallenge, sex, sexy, silver, smartphonephotography, song, space, spanish, spirituality, sport, sports, stach, steem, steem-network, steemchurch, steemdev, steemfest, steemgigs, steemit, steemit-health, steemiteducation, steemitphotochallenge, steemph, steemsilvergold, steemstem, steepshot, story, streetphotography, success, sunset, support, teamaustralia, teammalaysia, technology, test, thai, thealliance, tr, trading, travel, treetuesday, trending, trevonjb, trump, tutorial, untalented, upvote, usa, utopian-io, venezuela, video, vlog, walkwithme, welcome, whalepower, witness-category, world, writing, youtube, zappl
A Home for Globetrotters and Linguists
True, there are individual adjectives such as castellano, deutsch, english, japanese, polish and spanish, but these ambiguous tags could just as well be interpreted as referring to literature, culture or just people from said countries.
Because we either do a lot of traveling or have contact with people speaking languages other than our mother tongues, it is guaranteed that many Steemians are interested in language learning and linguistics. It therefore makes sense to carve out a small territory for this topic, so #steemstem and #science are probably the best home for us polyglots and language learners.
Is #steemstem really the best place? You could argue that language is an obvious extension of math, but then, what isn't? Perhaps a tag like #steemlang would be better?
There's a lot of stuff tagged #steemstem. It might work better to differentiate from the rest of the STEM content with a new, more specialized tag specifically for languages...
Whatever you go with, I wish you luck. I can't seem to find enough time to post regularly, so I don't know that I would be able to help in this interesting endeavor, but I'll definitely be peeking in to see how things are going.
Math? That would be a considerable stretch.
Linguistics and systematic language learning overlap with many stem topics, such physics (acoustic phonetics), information theory (corpus linguistics), neurophysiology, brain science, experimental psychology (syntax and semantics; mnemonics and other techniques).
On a personal note, many of my posts have a biology or medicine theme, so there is nothing inappropriate about using the #steemstem tag.
One aspect of language is grammar. Grammar is the set of rules for generating sentences in a given language. I consider that to be math, even if the set of symbols chosen isn't traditionally the same set of symbols that are generally thought of as math.
I certainly agree with your stated categories, as well. And I didn't consider the #steemstem tag to be inappropriate, just that there might be other tags that are more appropriate or that would provide higher specificity.
The Steemit developers don't seem to have provided a good mechanism for generating tags.
The trending section includes some longtail tags I have never even heard of. I have absolutely no idea what #markboss, #monomad, #muksteem, #stach, and #trevonjb (listed above) refer to: I can't even venture a firm guess (perhaps #trevonjb is a rapper?), but I'm sure these activities or people, whatever they are, can't be as popular as #languagelearning, a popular activity which is practiced worldwide, but doesn't even appear.
For many people, if a tag is not in the trending section, it's not worth bothering with. Anyone who insists on posting under #languagelearning or a related tag is condemned to obscurity. When I post under #steemstem, I'm sure that some interested people might at least take a look.
I'm also one of those infrequent posters. Sorry I took so long to respond..
Yeah, the tags are entirely up to the posters. That's one of the self-organizing aspects of the network that takes a deal of time to work itself out. Sadly, there aren't any good ways of filtering these on the steemit web site, so either you end up with all of the noise, or just the noise that makes it into trending.
I'm going to start including the #languagelearning tag in my related posts, but I don't know if I will bother with the #steemstem one.
It seems I've also become an infrequent poster. Life keeps getting in the way of me being "social" ;-)