Re: Art is when someone says 'Now' -- or is it?

On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 4:33 PM, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> wrote:

I agree with pretty much everything you said here, and
won't quote or comment in detail on much of it, except:


>> Is there any equivalent in other art forms to the state Brithenig is
>> in?
> I don't know.  Perhaps a role-playing game: there is a world and
> a set of rules set out in book form, but the actual narratives
> result from people playing it.  (Of course, the players can
Hmm.   Is that any indicator of a general similarity between
roleplaying and conlanging that's closer than the resemblances
between either of them and other art forms?  It's generally seemed
to me that roleplaying is most similar to fiction writing, on the
one hand, and theater, on the other hand; but here's an aspect
in which it's more similar to conlanging than either of those.

This reminds me that a friend once asked me if I thought
we could adapt Glossotechnia in such as way as to combine
it with a role-playing game.  We still haven't figured out a way
to do it yet.  The languages created by the players in Glossotechnia
games tend to lack concultural context; maybe it would be
interesting to add optional cards and rules covering
the language/culture interaction....?   And then the players could,
in addition to working on coining words to translate their
challenge sentences, also be roleplaying as persons living
in the as-yet-underspecified conculture that speaks the
language being created by the game?


>>       There can be art in the ways you
>> deliberately choose to leave certain grammatical capabilities out of a
>> language or in what concepts you deliberately choose not to
>> lexicalize.  The term "kitchen sink conlang" was coined for a good
>> reason.[1]
> Yes.  That's exactly what I meant when I said that art always means
> to choose what to do and what not to do.  There is an endless choice
> of possibilities, and you have to make a selection.  Otherwise, if
> you include everything you can think of, you end up with a kitchen
> sink conlang.  Old Albic, for instance, has 18 consonant phonemes,
> not because I could not think of more, but because I made a conscious
> choice to use certain phonemes and not to use many others.  There was
> a point when I had a list of phonemes and, as my FOAF put it, "said
> 'Now'":
The first version of gzb phonology, in March 1998, was pretty kitchen-sinky;
all the phonemes I knew how to pronounce and a few more I could barely
manage, and phonotactics that allowed zillions of consonant clusters.
I made major changes within a few weeks, and a few more changes over
the next two years; the phoneme inventory is still large, but hopefully it's
much more coherent than the original phoneme inventory, and the
phonotactics are much more elegant now.  The phonology has been
stable for eight years, and most parts of the grammar have been stable
for 3-6 years.   Certain semantic fields are very stable, others are still
growing by new root words although their overall structure is fixed,
and others are still in flux such that existing roots might narrow their
meaning as new roots are added to take on some of their workload.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/