Comment by ajarmst

I'd clarify that when people talk about "a different language", they're usually describing the notation used in formal mathematics. But that's a comparatively recent phenomena (most of it from the last century). For most of its history, mathematics was (and still is, most mathematics papers have far fewer uses of the notation than most laypeople would think) communicated with the natural language of its authors and their readers. The problem was that natural language was frequently too imprecise to easily describe things formally (inclusive vs exclusive or is an example), so mathematics writing became stilted and full of jargon and structural formalisms: "consider two values that are natural numbers and neither of which divides the other without remainder and ..." versus "$$ \{x,y \mid x,y \in \mathbb{Z}_+ \ \mathbb{and}\ x \perp y \}$$" (Edit: wait, Hacker News doesn't support MathJax?) Modern mathematics notation is more to simplify clear communication rather than to describe things that can't be described with words. That is, mathematical notation has far more in common with shorthand than it has with Esperanto, and I think that's an important distinction. When I read set-builder notation, what I "hear" in my head is English. (Also, you're begging the question by implying that there is an external concept/thing that the various languages and pictures are referencing)