Re: Reactions to the secret vice (was: Steg's wonderful sig.)

Sally Caves wrote:
>Jay Bowks wrote:
>>
>> Sally Caves <scaves@...>
>> >As soon as I invoked the "miniature" element, he could understand.
>> >See, he thought, at first, that I and all the rest of you are trying
>> >to build full-sized cities, all by ourselves.  <G>
>>
>> Neat, Sally,
>> But if he could only peer into my head about
>> the Bitruscan/Bira conlang and conculture...
>> ay ay ay... not only cities but the whole
>> society... someday I'm putting as much as
>> I can on the web... just for the pleasure of
>> downloading my brain :o)))
>
>And if he could peer into mine as well!  This person is a friend,
>and I like him a lot, but we're not on the same wavelength as far
>as this goes.  He's a fellow academic, and I was describing the
>essay I'm writing that I hope to put before an academic audience.
>
>> It was raw and brusque of him to call it "arrogant".
>
>Well... it was his knee-jerk reaction.  I could see the wheels turning
>in his head, as he was trying to find the word that best described
>what he thought I and the rest of us are doing.  He was laughing, too,
>when he said it.
>
>> This type of unfeeling attitude for others dreams
>> is something that I don't understand. A fancy of
>> the mind and wings to our dreams... this is the
>> stuff that cements our building languages...
>> que no?
>
>Yes, and sometimes I think we should keep our dreams secret.
>But I'm writing an essay on invented languages,
>one that I hope will counter the condescending press given it
>by the likes of Eco, Yaguello, and Schnapp.  The trick is to
>keep Teonaht out of it!
    You know, I can see how a person might term conlanging
as arrogance. In our discussions of the nuts and bolts (and
phonemes and morphemes) of lang and communication,
we tend to forget that language also is a shared _belief_
system.
    One wouldn't go into a community of staunch religious
fundamentalists and happily proclaim that one belongs to
a group of people that finds fun in making up all sorts
of new religions, some of which may be wild and wierd!
"Arrogant"  might be the _least_ thing said about you!
    Let's not forget that most people _are_ language
fundamentalists! One's lang is who one is (and who one
_isn't_!) At some level, most people aren't aware of the lang they
speak --- they just speak; it is the natural truth. (Those
who are multilingual may switch from system to system
but each system is its own truth.) I can see it as arrogance
in the extreme to try to come up with a new truth," since the
only real one already exists (and _I_ speak it!)". And
since it thus can't be done, it's even foolish to try!
    In other words, when describing what we do to non-conlangers,
I think that language's social and identity functions should
be taken into account as well as the grammar and
communication aspects.
    (Question: Sally, does your friend read any fantasy or
science fiction literature? Or does it have to be about
"real" people? If real people, does he read about them
in other cultures and times, or must they be only about
the culture he knows? Some people won't read literature
outside their belief system for similar reasons as above.
Same goes for the music they listen to, the art they view,
the sports they play/follow and in general all aspects of
one's life. Or at any rate, that's how it seems to me.
   ( BTW, Steg, my wife roared with laughter when I read her
your wonderful sig! She's not a linguist, but she's been
around me long enough to have absorbed some of the terminology.
She and I both loved it! )

Dan Sulani



--------------------------------------------------------------------
likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.

A word is an awesome thing.