Re: the Maligned Art

>Sally Caves wrote:
>[snipped]
>> Well there you have it, Bob.  People say "my language" or "my city," and
>> everybody knows that it's a fictional language or a fictional city.
>> On   this   listserv.
>Fictional cities, yes, but fictional languages? Because languages aren't
>physical objects, you can't make a fictional/non-fictional distinction.
>All the languages here are just as real as English or French or
>Japanese.
This is arguable (though I agree with you). It's arguable for the reasons
Sally notes in her response to you -- there are many differences between
artificial and "natural" languages: at least the "authorship" of conlangs
is much smaller, the lack of an active speaker base (typically), etc.

However, she missed your point, which I'll venture to re-state. We've
entered the realm of philosophy here, and you are taking the point of view
that a language is an abstract object, or concept, or mental system,
(depending on your other philosophical beliefs) -- something that exists
independent of it's speakers, etc. You, and I, (and maybe Matt) think of
the formal properties of a language: the completeness of its semantics --
the grammatical features required to to compose required new semantics from
the building blocks determined by the author, and so on.

This is probably the sense of "language" that makes the most sense for me.

However, the fact that languages in active use have many implicit
properties (probably related to how our neural hardware works) does mean
that some things are inherently underspecified until a language is put into
use.

I would argue that any number of constructed languages of art have
certainly reached a state where we have very good reason to believe that
they could be put into active use. We can know this because of what we know
about languages that are already in use, and how people use languages.

For non-naturalistic artlangs, we may not know this so well. I don't know
whether people could really learn to speak Tom O'Breton's ALLNOUN. It may
have enough power to express whatever a person wants, but I don't know if a
person could learn to speak it fluently.

>I can't see any distinction between conlangs and "real" languages,
>they are the same thing.
If you don't care to include those other properties (active speakers, etc.)

We're getting mired in essentiallist arguments here: is the abstract
structure (grammar and base semantics) that enables communication the
"core" concept of language? I tend to think so, but, it's equally plausible
to say that social and communicative activities are the core of language.
When we study Latin, we are really studying (what we know about) some
generalizations about past social activities. We're studying the "history"
of something that is no longer a "real" (or "living") language. Conlangs,
if they have no communicative present or past, therefore aren't "real"
languages because the social activity is not present, and never even was
present (so we can't even study the history of the activity).

I think the second analysis misses something because it's not very
illuminating about how language revivals can happen. Or even how a new
langauge can be started. It seems to me that there was something there, the
moment Zamenhof finished his Esparanto grammar, and before the social
activity began. That there's something similar there (if woefuly
incomplete) in the grammars that I've written. That there's something
similar there in the very impressive grammar of Tokana on my shelf,
regardless of the fact that Tokana socialization has a very restricted
scope (some small number of email communications).

I think we've run this into the ground...

If we go on, we're going to have to start a new list: "analytic philosophy
of the definition of the term language, and it's relation to artificial and
natural so-called languages." That seems like it's too long for LISTSERV.

The above is not a call for moderation, but me saying that I've started to
repeat myself, so I'll shut up now...

  -- David
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Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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