Re: Lighting Some Flames: Towards conlang artistry

In a message dated 03/13/02 12:42:33 AM, jaspax@JUNO.COM writes:

<< There's no such thing as bad

art."  IMHO, this is plain hogwash, the purest example of the

postmodern fallacy.  Just because value judgements differ doesn't

mean that value judgements are meaningless. >>

    Huh.  These two statements are unrelated.  True, there is bad art.  True,
value judgments are meaningless, for what you're trying to do.  How does one
preclude the other?  If we agree that, say, the Back Street Boys are on the
low end of the musical artistry spectrum, and agree that value judgments are
NOT meaningless, then the Back Street Boys must be one of the greatest bands
ever: Look at how many fans they have, how many records they've sold...  By
validating value judgments as a group, you have to then construct a method to
invalidate some value judgments, but not others, which would produce another
set of criteria.
    Now, after saying this, I'd like to point out that I personally don't
think value judgments are meaningless; I think that dialectic criticism is.
However, if you're operating within the frame of dialectic criticism (which
is where ye be), then value judgments are meaningless.
    Also, as per the system you devised, I'd like to warn you that it would
be dreadfully easy to create a language that meets all those criteria but
that is quite obviously "poor art".  For example, if you operate under
naturalness, I've seen so many ridiculously crazy things in natural languages
that there's very little that I've seen people create that is actually
unnatural.  Very, very little.  And the way this works is that if you can
cite an example in the natural world, then it passes.  And there are
thousands of languages out there.  So, let's draft one up, really quick.
Let's take the simplest phonology out there that I know of: Hawaiian (a e i o
u p k h v l m n ?).  So, let's say that in this new language, every verb has
to be CVCVC.  So, you have two verbs: hakuv and palam.  (Their meanings, of
course, are irrelevant, since you made no mention of semantics.)  Let's say
you have four tenses: Present, Past, Future and Irrealis.  Here's how you'll
conjugate the verb:

Present: hakuv, palam
Past hak:uv, pal:am
Future: ha:kuv, pa:lam
Irrealis: hakvu:, palma:

    Unnatural?  I'd have said so last year before I came across Miwok.  All
their verbs work this way.  And only their verbs; they don't have a system
like Arabic.  Their noun system is agglutinative.  So why not work with
another agglutinative language: Turkish?  Let's take a noun: mem.  Here are
some suffixes: -mUm (plural); -mOm (commitative--"with").  (By the way, /O/
and /U/ are underspecified vowels which get there +/- back feature from the
vowel in the root.)  So, you can have a word: memmimmem.  Why not?  Then
let's create another noun, /lol/, and another suffix, /lOl/ (agent), and
another noun, /nen/, and another suffix, /nOn/ (patient).  So you could have
a sentence (let's make it SVO): lollol pal:am nennen memmimmem.  This would
mean "(a/the) lol x'd (a/the) nen with mems".  And you could give these
meanings, if you wanted, so it becomes "I watch a movie with some friends".
So, you have a language that's not unnatural, that's vastly different from
English, and even Miwok, Hawaiian and Turkish, which lent it ideas, and,
thus, still original.  It's not pretty, though, and that sentence does not
look like a natural one.  True, you can produce tongue twisters in languages,
but these are either very contrived (whoever talks about a woman who sells
seashells by the seashore?  If I were there, I'd just gather them on my own),
or if they're extremely common, they'll probably change over time.  Yet, you
could draw up the semantics to make such montrosities very common.
    Point is, your idea is seriously lacking in semantics, which I consider
to be the most facet of a language.  Semantics and derivational morphology
are what I personally look at in languages.  You might want to think about
how to deal with that.

<<I also take up your invitation,

David, to evaluate Kamakawi, though of course it will take me a

little while to get around to it.>>

    Not a problem.  Just tell me what you want and when you want it.  What's
online is hardly comprehensive.

-David

"Zi hiwejnat zodZaraDatsi pat Zi mirejsat dZaCajani sUlo."
"The future's uncertain and the end is always near."
                --Jim Morrison

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