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

Jim:
<<
Are you sure that this is purely arbitrary based on an artform's
cultural status and the way it's published to its audience?
I suspect that even decades or centuries in the future, when
all or nearly all publication is electronic and the marginal
costs of producing revised editions is near zero, you'll find
relatively many conlangers who keep working on their
magnum opus throughout their whole life, never considering
it finished, and relatively few novelists who do the same with
their major works.
 >>

In a way, though, I don't think we're comparing like things.
The novel it supposed to be bounded; conlangs not necessarily
so.  If one's goal is to create a language that is akin to a natural
language (which is not the goal of every conlang, of course,
but let's just stick with naturalistic ones for now), then it should
never end, in the same way that natural languages never end.
Take Latin, for instance.  It *seems* like it's a "finished" language
because there will never be any new words, and we can actually
point to a finished grammar and a finite set of words that will
never expand.  Given the documents that we have, there are
different stages in Latin, but it's bounded purely because its
speakers are dead.  That, however, is the *only* reason it's bounded.

A novel isn't like this.  It's goal is to be bounded.  In any novel,
the characters could go on living (or time could go on) after
the end; it just doesn't.  The end serves the purpose of the
novelist.  There goal isn't to reproduce life, let's say (talking
about a realistic novel), but to tell a story.

I really think a better example is something like a series.  Before
publication, characters, timelines, universes, and key points
*do* go through major revisions.  There are times when an
author gets to the end of book 1, and realizes it'd be better
if the main character was raised by goatherds, instead of in
a castle, and so chapter 1 gets entirely rewritten.  The only
reason that doesn't happen after publication is because of
the various reasons I mentioned before.  But what if there
were no publication?  What if in book 7 of a potentially endless
series *that's* when it struck the author that the main
character should be raised by goatherds?  It could happen.
The only difference is once published, the author doesn't
have that choice.  I contend that the same is true of a conlang.

But anyway, who knows?  There is no way this could be
settled, since we can't reorder time and make it so that novels
aren't publishable.  Also, there is a difference between types
of conlangs.  There are at least three different types that
cross traditional boundaries:

-Usable: Presumably, an infinite vocabulary is necessary.
-Modern: Should include words for cell phones, pagers, etc.
-Non-Modern: Vocabulary is bounded.

So, for example, if one is creating a language spoken by a
stone age tribe, you can create every word and be done.
If you have to figure out what the word for "wiki" is going
to be, the conlang will never be finished.  Consider Toki
Pona.  It's only "finished" in the most narrow definition of
the word.  It's as finished as my language Kelenala.  One
still has to figure out how to apply the created lexemes to
modern discourse, and that is a process which will never
be finished.

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/