Re: art and language: was, lexicon

On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 02:23:29AM -0400, Sally Caves wrote:
> Can we get along without fine art?  Sure.  But it wouldn't (at least
> to me) be a life worth living.  Can we live a life without craft?
> Not and remain essentially human.  Maybe that's one aspect of the
> difference between the crafts and the arts.
Okay, I'll buy that.

> Language is an art.
I would say, rather, that skillful use of language is artistic - and
largely at the craftish end of your spectrum, with exceptions
such as poetry, which I would lump with the fine arts.

Everyone who is not physically impaired in some way speaks or
signs their dialect perfectly according to its basic grammatical
rules (as opposed to the prescriptive ones grafted on after the
fact by grammarians); it's natural and automatic.  That is the
sense in which language is fundamental and hard-wired.   Once you
move beyond that basic ability into skillful use of language, with
finely-honed rehtorical skills, you're no longer in the realm
of universal instinct.  To be sure, effective communication must
have conferred a survival advantage, and facility with language does
seem to be a heritable trait, so there is a sense in which the potential
for such is hardwired.  But it (obviously!) hasn't taken over the species
and become a universal trait the way the ability to language at all has.

> I still maintain that language and craft developed together, tongue and
> hand.  What other animal on this planet vocalizes or builds with as much
> complexity as the human animal?
Almost certainly they developed together.  It is probably no coincidence
that the language centers of the brain are in the left hemisphere, which
also controls the dominant hand in most humans.  My objection
was to the characterization that language originated as a form
of purely artistic expression - a fine art.  I may have misconstrued the
original statement, but that is what I've been arguing against.

> Perhaps it's because I've devoted my life to teaching young adults
> how to make their writing and their speaking more artfully efficient and
> inventive, and to open their minds to the antiquity and complexity of the
> written arts.  I'm not about to hear that this is a "luxury," or that it is
> "the ultimate in free expression, refusing to obey set channels or rules."
Excuse me while I wipe my words off of my face . . . there, that's better.

> Skill in rhetoric follows some definite rules, and one's mastery of it opens
> more doors.
Every artistic medium - certainly including linguistic ones - has
its rules.  All I meant by that last quotation was that art in
general seems to be in the eye of the beholder.  In particular,
it gets beheld by many people in many cases where I simply don't
see it.  I'm unwilling to assume that I'm right and they're just
wrong, thus my necessarily loose definition of "art".



> Off to bed.  Happy conlanging.
Thank you.  To you as well.

-Mark

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