Re: [DISC] Is Language Creation Art?

David Peterson wrote:
>In a message dated 03/13/02 10:00:14 AM, and_yo@HOTMAIL.COM writes:
>
><< Tell me why I should want Conlanging to become (considered as) a serious
>art.>>
>
>     To this, and to other statements like this: I don't like hobbys; I
>don't
>like crafts.
Good for you. For me, hobbies are the main source of satisfaction in my
life.

>  I've never had any, and I don't plan to ever take any up.  When
>I do something, I don't fiddle around with it, I do it.
I'm not sure I get the distinction. Do the amount of time I spend on an
activity, and the level of skill and knowledge I have in it, affect whether
it's a hobby or not? To take an example, I've spent vastly more time
studying history for my own enjoyment than I've ever spent on studying
history at school, and I'm confident to say that I've acquired incomparably
much more knowledge and understanding the former way than the latter, yet,
you can't dispute that the first is a hobby and the second not, can you?

>  I don't create
>languages to see how different things would work; I create them for the
>aesthetic, and only for the aesthetic.  To me, creation is the basis of
>art.
I doesn't try to make my Conlangs "beautiful", but, obviously, I conlang
because I enjoy the process and the results. That's, to me, the definition
of a hobby - something I do because I like doing it, not because I have to
earn money or pass exams. Surely an activity doesn't automatically become an
art because it's creative?

>If, then, one creates something seriously, and wants it to be taken
>seriously, then it should be taken seriously. Why you should want it?
>Frankly, I don't care.  If you don't, and it does (which it just might not,
>in our lifetimes, if ever), would this somehow affect you in a negative
>way?
We-ell, if someone came across my conlang work, and begun searching it for
clues as to my personality, political views and agenda etc, I should be
quite upset. Also, I'm afraid the community of the Conlang list would fall
apart if we became preoccupied with the artistic merits with this or that
approach to language-creation, with accompanying disdain of what fails to
meet this or that standard.

>If so, that would be defining one's self and one's beliefs based on
>external
>forces.
No, that would be being annoyed by other peoples' attitudes towards one.

  If one agrees that this is so (and I'm not saying that that's a
>given), why would you want to hinder language creation becoming an
>accepted,
>serious art?  After all, as John Milton said, a virtue untested is an
>impure
>virtue, and, therefore, not a virtue at all.
Well, I wouldn't want to hinder a such development - I'd merely refuse to
support it. Jesse's original mail assumed that "all who care about
conlanging" would want a such development to take place; whereas I, who do
claim to care about conlanging, am afraid that it would create tensions and
splits without giving anything to me, and, in the worst case, I would be
told that my conlanging is worthless because it doens't meet some standards.
Just as I can resent somebody calling me a fool without giving that person
any right whatsoever to judge my intellectual capacity, I can resent
somebody's opinions on my hobby without giving that person a right to difine
what my hobby is about.

                                                   Andreas

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