A Symphony of Language

This paper aims to illustrate and illuminate the relationship between language and its neighbor disciplines, in particular between language and literature, language and religion, and language and music. 1. Language and literature. Literature is an art of language. Therefore, linguistics, the science of language, should be able to explain how the grammar of literature elevates and ordinary language into a literary language. I illustrate poetic syntax with examples from Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. 2. Language and religion. I show how a linguistic analysis of a religious text can illuminate the background, authorship, chronology, etc., of a religious text with an example from the Book of Daniel. I also illustrate how a misanalysis of a poetic meter led to a mistranslation with an example from the Book of Psalms. 3. Language and music. First I trace an epochal event in the history of the Western music, i.e., the change of the musical style from the liturgical music of Latin in which the rhythm was created by the alternation of syllable duration into the liberated music of German in which the rhythm was generated by the alternation of lexical stress. I then illustrate a parallelism between linguistic and musical structures with several musical pieces including Gregorian chant, the 16th century music of Palestrina, the 17th century music of Schutz, the 18th century music of Mozart, and the 19th century Viennese music. Finally, the importance of text-tune (verse-melody) association is discussed with examples of mismatches in translated Korean hymns and contemporary Korean lyrical songs. In the concluding part, I speculate on some factors that are responsible for the same organizational devices in three different modes of human communication. An answer may be that all are under the same laws of mind that govern the way man perceives and organizes nature, i.e., the same cognitive abilities of man, in particular, the capacity to organize and impose structure on their respective inputs.