Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Null sign

Null sign

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(Removed prod.) This article conflates mathematical and linguistic uses of the symbol, implying that these uses are related. Two problems: First, the concepts in the two fields are quite different. The linguistic use is to represent a linguistic element that might be in that place but is not. The mathematical use is for a set that contains nothing; in particular, the set containing the empty set is different from the empty set, whereas no such distinction is evident in the linguistic use. Second, the term "null sign", in my experience, is not used for this symbol in mathematics.
It is possible (I wouldn't know) that this is in fact the standard name for this symbol in linguistics. In that case, an alternative to deletion would be to rewrite the article so as to make it entirely about linguistics, and remove the implication that the name "null sign" is used for the empty-set symbol in mathematics. Trovatore (talk) 19:45, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Mathematics-related deletion discussions. CAPTAIN RAJU^(T) 22:01, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Keep My understanding is that this article is about the typographic symbol. Typically typographic symbols have multiple uses in different fields and it is normal to discuss the different uses in an article about the symbol. In the Unicode standard (first ref in the article), we can verify that codepoint 2205 has the description "EMPTY SET" and represents the "null set" in math and the "null morpheme" in linguistics, both described in the article. If you look at for instance, Exclamation mark, the article has the same kind of structure. Factorials in math are unrelated to exclamations in linguistics, but they both use the symbol and are described there. I think it would be good to clarify in the article that math and linguistic uses for the symbol are different concepts and that the symbol is referred to by different names, if it is not already clear. That is a matter of editing, however, not deletion. If you have beef with the title of the article, that could also be discussed on the talk page. I don't see a policy-based rationale for deletion here. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 20:46, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
- Hmm, what would you say to merging into Ø (disambiguation)? On reflection that would address most of my concerns. --Trovatore (talk) 22:08, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  It's a little tricky because disambig pages shouldn't have expository content. This article doesn't have much but it has a little. Maybe instead merge into Ø? --Trovatore (talk) 22:12, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Goldsztajn (talk) 06:52, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]