Re: Lighting Some Flames: Towards conlang artistry

On Mon, 11 Mar 2002 20:16:37 -0800, Jesse Bangs <jaspax@...> wrote:

>To All Who Care About Conlanging:
[snip]

>It should not need to be proved that some art is better than others.  If
>we as conlangers wish to gain acceptance for our art, then we need to
>acknowledge this and allow for the judgement that some conlangs are
>better than others.  We need a serious body of *conlang criticism*.
>Currently, this is almost entirely lacking on the Conlang list.  When
>someone posts texts or grammatical sketches, the responses are generally
>entirely congratulatory, or they are concerned only with correcting
>technical errors or confusions within the grammar.  Often there are no
>responses at all.  While technical accuracy and consistency are
>important, it's outrageous that this is where our critique stops.  We
>need to move beyond the foundation of technical accuracy and allow for
>the artistic analysis of our conlangs.
Well, artistic pleasure is what we get from our conlangs and our
conlanging, isn't it? But, as a sage said, "individuals' personal
predilection... varies widely". Different people get different aspects of
conlanging to give pleasure - some may contemplate the phonetic pleasure,
and some the weirdity and oddity (it seems I could name a few on this list
that do... ;-)). I don't think we should impose some criteria to "judge"
the conlangs. What I value much, if not most, about conlanging is the
atnosphere, or the subculture or whatever you call it. Would we want to be
meeting the newbies with a vareity of schools, each opffering a different
list of flaws, which will eventually cover all the the newcomer has ever
done. I don't think that publicity is a good reason to destroy the
atmosphere.

>Of course the objection is "by what criteria?"  It's clear that we can't
>all agree on one style of phonetic beauty, much less on which syntax,
>morphology, or vocabulary is best.  But this is, in fact, exactly what we
>expect.  The study of the history of art, music, or literature is a long
>series of redefinitions of what is proper, what is better, and a constant
>critical re-evaluation of everything that's gone before.  This
>chronological tension is an essential part of the formation of
>literatures and arts, and if conlanging is to be an art instead of a
>hobby, then it must also expect this.  The important thing is that
>conlanging start to have a critical apparatus within which the artistic
>merits of conlangs can be evaluated and where different schools of
>thought can define and defend themselves.
I am afraid this approach may eventually lead to another breakup of the
list :-(

[snip]

>Of course this won't be popular with everyone, especially not when I
>start telling people why their conlangs suck.  Why should it?  If you
>disagree with me, form your own school.  But by all means, we have to
>start allowing for the critical analysis of conlangs to make them into an
>actual art form.  As a side effect of this, we also have to start taking
>each others conlangs seriously--putting in the time to understand and
>evaluate them.
Well, this _is_ a good point. However, I guess if we were to evaluate each
and every other person's conlang (even there's only one for each... also
something I find hard to agree with), how about 72 hours a day? :-) From
time to time someone gets interested in a conlang of another's - and that's
a success already.

[snip]

Followup to be posted later, I'm writing this from school.

--Pavel