Re: Lighting Some Flames: Towards conlang artistry

From: "Jesse Bangs" <jaspax@...>
>The thing to do, then, seems to be to start such a school, and simply get
>down to the business of evaluating conlangs as works of art.  I therefore
>announce the founding of the Naturalist school of conlanging, which
>regards the following three things as values [...]
Interesting.

What might be better than attempting to found a school of thought solo might
be
to actually go around and gather opinions...

Me personally, I look at conlangs more as craft than art--the things I think
make a good conlang first are standard things like that:  the quality and
readability of the presentation; whether standard notations including but not
limited to phonemic/phonetic brackets, X-SAMPA, unicode, etc. are used;
completeness [not necessarily complexity or quantity of data, but at least a
workable phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and texts].   A conculture
per
se is not necessary, although a statement of the purpose of the language is
always useful (at the very least something along the lines of "used in the
ancient scriptures of Martian ringworms in my new book")

[I do not worry about mentioning all these 'rules' here as I know I have
already
broken them all.]

Creativity is important, IMO, but not so much in the sense you describe.
Making
something original is an important point... but this does not necessarily mean
something different from you.  No problem in making, e.g., a "euroclone" if
it's
*different* somehow.  My personal axe wielded against unoriginality is "trendy
features", foremost being Tolkieno-elvishism, followed shortly by
Celto-mutationism (which I may not be so much against for unoriginality as
incomprehensibility.. my own taste is that, however they are pronounced, words
on paper should leave each other alone).

    *Muke!
--
http://www.frath.net/