Re: Fakelangs

----- Original Message -----
From: "And Rosta" <a.rosta@...>

> > > In the field of Alternate History, a famous exemplar of this sort
> > > of thing is Robert Sobel's _For want of a nail_: it reads like an
> > > ordinary scholarly work of history.
> >
> > Sort of like a nihilartikel?
>
> I had to google for this word, which is new to me, (best source:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilartikel )
> and the answer is "Yes: sort of". But without the mischievous intent
> to deceive (or to deceive the unduly credulous). Instead, you might
> compare it (the Fake-X) to the film _The Blair Witch Project_: I
> haven't seen it, but as I understand it, it is constructed as though
> it were authentic documentary footage, rather than an authored film.
>
> --And.
I have to say I love this idea of a "fake" natlang.  Put me on board!  I was
waiting for And's response, for I remember a similar conversation with him
on another list--whether there have been any artificial languages passed off
as real languages.  I conceived an amusing fantasy of a demented librarian
who prints a dictionary and grammar of an invented language, prints up a
body of poetry and some sagas, puts Dewey Decimal numbers on the bindings
and inserts them in the University Library, and then lists them, somehow, in
the on-line card catalogue; then fakes requests for copies of these books,
ships them off to other libraries, writes articles about them and publishes
them in Linguistics Journals, manages to get entries into amazon.com....
sort of like the Iolo Morgannwg of Conlangers.

As for the BWP, as I call it, in my other life (and my other name) I
co-edited a volume of essays with Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock on this film.  It
came out January of this year:  Nothing That Is: Millennial Cinema and the
Blair Witch Controversies.  Yes, the movie is constructed as though it were
the salvaged footage of a would-be student documentary, and it was
deliberately grainy and badly filmed in order to convey authenticity.
Hollywood films bend over backwards to erase the camera from their films,
and all the seams of film-editing, which BWP emphasized.  Video somehow
seems more "authentic."  It fooled a lot of viewers, especially with its
website.  The filmmakers were very careful, they told me, to state at the
end that it was a fiction (which they do) and therefore it could not be
called a "hoax."  Their intention was not to deceive (ha!), but rather to
allow viewers to come away from the film with their own interpretations.
The materials for the website, though, and the books ostensibly by one D.A.
Stern (crime/forensics/reports, missing posters, Heather's diary--aged and
water streaked, old woodcuts of Elly Kedward, old photographs) are all
creatively faked, amounting to a masterpiece of "heritage noire" as Sally
Morgan puts it:  a backwater history and ghost story that COULD have
surrounded a town in post-Puritan America.

Sally
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~whatsteo.html

Some visitors to my website have thought Teonaht was a real language.

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