Re: The magic of conlang (was: Has anyone made a real conlang?)

En réponse à Harald Stoiber :

I have little to say to what you wrote, except to say that I agree heartily
with you! Congratulations for putting in words a feeling I had had for long
in me without being able to express it correctly!

As for you, it's my conlanging that made me discover the beauty of the
variety of languages, which can be compared to the beauty and variety of
flowers, all different, all beautiful in their own ways. It also made me
rediscover my own native tongue, which I took for granted and found frankly
boring. Thanks to conlanging and the eye and ear it brought me, I
discovered a world of originality in my own language, a world that I hadn't
even suspected to exist! Since then, I look at my native tongue with new
eyes, and I discover new things everyday!

As for your comment about non-artistic benefits stemming from conlanging, I
would even generalise that by saying that without art, there would be no
science! All great scientists were not for nothing great artists too (if
unknown as artists for many of them). Look at Leonardo da Vinci for
example, a master and genius if there is one! In my branch of science, i.e.
fluid mechanics and more exactly turbulence, an artistic mind is necessary
for the scientific research. We research phenomena which are too complex to
be describe correctly mathematically, and we are obliged to resort to many
simplifications to be able to treat them. But not all simplifications are
meaningful, and very often we need to choose between possibilities without
knowing exactly what will work and what will not. In those cases, a purely
scientific mind could never find the best solution, but an artistic mind
can. Indeed, most turbulent phenomena, when made visible by some way or
another, show hidden structures, hidden symmetries or quasi-symmetries,
chaotic behaviour (such as the most well know strange attractor:
http://www.sat.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~hideyuki/java/Attract.html, which by itself
is definitely beautiful in an artistic way!), which need an artistic mind
to appreciate and understand. And from this understanding stems the correct
solution.
Art, Science and Technology form three hooks of a triangle, or three points
of a circle, and each needs the other two to exist. Art cannot exist
without Technology, even technology as simple as using your hand and your
brains, because Art is about creating (or subcreating, as Tolkien would
say), and you cannot create without tools. Science cannot exist without
Art, because an artistic mind is needed to provide for new hypotheses, new
and provocative ideas that Science needs to evolve and not become a
sclerosed thing. And finally, Technology cannot exist without Science,
because in order to make effective tools, you eventually need to understand
how things work. Here, the circle is closed. Art, Science and Technology
need each other to exist. The scientist who finds art unimportant is like
the plant which cuts its own roots: they will dry up to an unproductive
thing, incapable of bringing anything new.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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