Re :

Dans un courrier dat=E9 du 05/10/99 08:12:11  , tu as =E9crit :

> Ed Heil wrote:
>  >
>  > Hey, I saw a copy of Yaguello's _Lunatic Lovers of Language_ at the
>  > bookstore.  I browsed it a little bit, and wondered how a book about
>  > imaginary languages could be in the least credible if it doesn't
>  > bother to mention Tolkien at all?  (And it goes on and on about a
>  > supposedly UFO-borne "Martian Language"...)
>  >
>  > Has anyone here read it?  What did you think?  (I gather Sally rather
>  > dislikes it...)
>  >
> =20
>          Ask Mathias, he knows much about it :) .
i wish i did know about it.

i called Yaguello once to make a training document on constructed
languages. she said OK. we discussed a bit about langues imaginaires.
she was surprised and told me that Ettore Scola would know better.
i was sure she was right. so i didn't interview her.

if you make a book on painting from visiting van gogh in his asylum
only, for sure all painters are lunatics.
although i wouldn't deny painters, musicians and artists as a whole a rather
"special" character ;-)

i think like BDW.
most people think that making a language is crazy
because they think it is "impossible".
they think it is impossible because to most of them
a language seems a huge, incomprehensible mess of sounds
with apparently so many parts and structures that they really think
noone can master it - and anyone claiming to invent another
mess must be a mess himself.

painters and musicians enjoy paintings and music for how they look
and sound but also for how they are technically designed - and how
one can expand them with one's own creation.
conlangers like languages for how they sound and express but also
for how their grammar and vocabulary are technically designed - and how
one can expand them with one's own creation.

i think this is the crux :

in our time literature, painting and music are
meant to communicate with oneself, i.e., to express oneself.
but language is solely meant as an instrument to communicate
with other people.
so making a language would equate making an instrument
of communication where communication is impossible.

i personally feel language as an instrument to both
communicate and express myself.

is expressing oneself by making a language the
symptom of mental disease in contrast to symptoms
of artistic creativity such as painting, music, literature,
architecture, design, etc. ?

conlangers do not express their artistic creativity making language
by mere chance. the potential use of one's conlang for communication
in real or imaginary worlds is indeed what makes us conlanging.
if language were expressed with music or painting, no doubt
all of us would turn musicians or painters.

but we are also the ones who experience everyday
that communication and language can be dealt separately.
we don't delude ourselves with words because we know we can make
and unmake them in a second.
this is something very difficult  for non-conlangers to understand.
to them words are the immutable parts of a whole construction
designed by and for a community - not strokes from an individual's
whimful brush. speaking a language identifies with an community.
making a language is tantamount to denying the community.

quite apart from that

it strikes me that all fresh conlangers go through the same technical=20
questions
before realizing that only a few bolts and a little glue is needed to make
a language that "works".

i appreciate available FAQs.
but i think they discuss PoS and vocabulary in a very conservative,
scholar way : 1. nouns 2. verbs. 3. adjectives. 4. articles 5. prepositions.=20
etc.

we need tell new conlangers that these categories are the way our
languages deal with larger categories such as "action", "state",=20
"dependence", "integration", "lexicalisation" etc. and that other kinds of=20
grammar are possible
and actually widely used elsewhere in the world.

i think this issue is important because i can see how new conlangers
have a hard time to get rid of these corsetted examples to eventually
make their own grammar - often far away from FAQs' classifications.

and it strikes me too that conlangers are not so interested in other=20
conlangers'
langs until they succeed in making a grammar that is enough coherent
and artistically satisfying to them.


mathias
=20