Re: Are conlangs fictional?

En réponse à Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>:

>
> In the first case: if Einstein is mentioned in a
> story, this definitely doesn't make him fictional.
> While fictional Prof. Sickbock and Dr. Lupardi appear
> only in stories and thus are fictional.
> However, if one of those fictional bad guys suddenly
> appears on paintings or in other stories by other
> artists, they remain fictional. I could make a drawing
> of them, but it won't make them more real. Even if
> they were conceived by their authors much earlier, and
> even if those authors had an entire world in mind in
> which they would appear, they would still be
> fictional.
Yep, but that doesn't compare to languages. In this cases, those people, bad
guys, or whatever, still appear *in* something, in a painting (in which case
the scene represented cannot refer to anything real, since at least one
character never appeared in real life) or a story by somebody else. For a
language, that would mean being referred to in other stories, even have an
example written in a painting. Of course in this case the language would remain
fictional. But in the case of Quenya and Sindarin, it would compare better with
having the fictional bad guy appearing *in reality* (I'd prefer a good guy
then, but you chose the example :)) ), because they can be independent of *any*
fictional setting (while your bad guy still has to appear *in* something), like
a real person. They can have been used in a fictional setting, even designed
for this fictional setting (like Klingon), but like the bad guy suddenly
popping up into existence, they don't need any fictional setting to carry on
existing, while your painted bad guy can only appear as part of a fiction, even
if it's from another author or in a painting. You cannot talk about this bad
guy without referring to one of the fictions he appears in. You can talk about
Quenya or Sindarin without referring once to LotR.

>
> In the second case fictionality means, that
> something's existence if limited to the book (or
> painting or whatever) were it appears.
OK, this definition was a little restrictive. Let's replace the "*the* fiction"
by "*a* fiction". :))

 If you apply
> this criterium to languages, is would mean that the
> only fictional languages are those that exist only
> within the limits of a book or fictional setting
> (Hergé's Syldavian would be a nice example of this),
Indeed. But Mark Rosenfelder did a reconstruction of Syldavian, and this, like
the Necronomicon of my former example, can hardly be called fiction.

> languages that in most cases have nothing but a name.
> But what about OUR languages, most of which are more
> than just a name and a few sentences?
>
> Literature can be divided into fiction and
> non-fiction. The latter tells stories that have really
> happened and discusses their background, while fiction
> is made up by the author.
Well, I'm not sure of this. First, where do you put scientific literature in
that picture? Is a scientific theory fictional? Is it fictional until it's
proven right? Does it become fictional after having been used a lot and then
invalidated by more precise experiments? Even historical books are partly
fictional by your definition: where does hypothesis stop and when does fiction
begin? Both are still made up by their author. Where do you put biographies in,
which should be quite non-fiction but in fact contain as much fiction as any
book? They are just based on actual facts. Apart from the stenographic report
of a day in court, what is non-fiction in this case?

 This division could be very
> well applied to languages as well: non-fictional
> languages are those language that exist or have
> existed, fictional languages are those made up by
> somebody (no matter what it is used for).
But then the distinction between fictional and constructed disappears! Is
Esperanto fictional? Was it fictional and became non-fiction later? Where do
you put the limit? the problem with that kind of definition is that you can't
put a limit (nor even simply a transition) anywhere.

Another problem is that a language cannot be compared to a story (it would be
better compared to the book containing the story). It's an entity that doesn't
contain a development (you can talk about its development, in real life or in a
fictional setting, but then you're making a story *about* the language, not the
language itself. There are people who have written fictions featuring Einstein,
after all) and is more comparable to a poem. Can you call a poem fictional?
Even if it appears in a story, the poem in itself, the entity "poem" is not a
fiction: it has been written down, it can be read, studied outside the context
where it appeared, like any poem. On the other hand, a poem which would be
named in a story (or various stories) but never actually written down would be
a fictional poem, with no existence ouside the context of a fiction. IMO, this
fits much better languages, and even the usual meaning of the word "fiction",
than your definition.

> This works better than comparing languages to visual
> art, music (is there "fictional" music?),
Yep, a piece of music referred to in a story but never actually written and
played. But a piece of music part of a movie plot and which is actually written
down and used in the movie is not fiction, because it exists by itself from now
on, even outside the context of fiction.

It seems that "fictional" is another of those words that people all know but
nobody can find a good definition of it :)) . If we agree that "fiction" refers
to "stories made up by their author" however vague that is, I think we should
define "fictional" as: "existing only in the setting of fiction" (without
specifying "a fiction" or "the fiction"). As soon as you *can* (it doesn't mean
that you have to or that you always do) refer to something outside the setting
of fiction (that's to say outside the setting of any story), it's no longer
fictional. This definition fits the common meaning of it quite well, and
doesn't stretch it so far that it loses all meaning, like any other meaning
I've seen. And it doesn't mean that we cannot use the word 'fictional' to refer
to a language used in a fictional setting. We just have to remember that in
that case "fictional" has another meaning that refers just to the use of the
language.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.