Re: the Maligned Art

On Sun, 8 Nov 1998, Simon Kissane wrote:

> 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,
Their words impact our ears as waves on air; our eyes take in their shapes
on the page.  Our mouths are busy making noises with them.  Certainly they
are physical. We live in cities the way we live in languages.  Cities have
different emotional connotations to different people, they "mean"
different things to the people who inhabit them.   So do languages.

you can't make a fictional/non-fictional distinction.
> All the languages here are just as real as English or French or
> Japanese.
> You could say they have no or very few speakers, but then some
> "real" languages have no or very few speakers either. (How many people
> speak Proto-Indo-European?)
PIE is not a "real" language, Simon.  It's a reconstructed language, a
hypothesis.  Hence the "asterisk" in front of all its invocations.

> You might say they have been invented, but all languages have been
> invented. Most people in their life conlang a word or two, and the
> only difference between conlangs and "real" languages is that
> rather than a large group of people inventing a word or two each,
> you have one person inventing a whole language...
>
> I can't see any distinction between conlangs and "real" languages,
> they are the same thing.
>
> Simon Kissane
>
Simon... it doesn't seem that you have been following this particular
thread very well (which started as "Lunatic Again)."  If you had been,
then you would take up your gripe here with my opponent, who doesn't think
that applying the word "language" to an invented language is allowable in
all cases.  I DO. But I'm not under the impression that there is NO
distinction between conlangs and "real" languages--the very crucial one
being that the natural languages are spoken by many people and didn't
naturally originate with one inventive individual but have rather evolved
over a long period of time and more by unconscious social consensus than
by conscious committee, and from other languages and not _a priori_.  I
mean take a look at it: what we're doing here is very unnatural, whether
we're auxlanging, loglanging, or artlanging.  Natural languages just don't
subsist in this way; the wheel isn't reinvented for every newborn
infant--he is born into a linguistic *tradition* in most cases. As for the
"fiction"  part, there are quite a number of invented languages, such as
mine, for instance, meant to flesh out or accompany fiction.  The issue:
are we making languages?  Yes.  Must the word "language" only refer to
"natural language"?  Or a conceivably spoken language?  No.

It's the term "language" that is in dispute here (whether it can be an
umbrella term under which natural and invented languages can fall), and in
this respect I am arguing for YOUR sense of a more all-encompassing
distinction, along with David Durand and other members who've spoken up.

Please don't snip explanatory material wherein you distort or simplify my
argument; please know who is arguing what about what; and please read and
absorb the whole thread.  It has its roots in the Lunatic Again thread.

Cordially, Sally
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Sally Caves
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/contents.html

Li fetil'aiba, dam hoja-le uen.
volwin ly, vul inua aiba bronib.

This leaf, the wind takes her.
She's old, and born this year.
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