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

Hallo!

On Sun, 10 Aug 2008 20:19:53 -0400, Jim Henry wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 5:54 PM, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:
>
> [what if Okrand revised Klingon]
>
> Indeed, that can happen even while a conlang exists
> only on the Internet, with nobody paying the author
> anything.
Sure.  With most conlangs published web-only, there are
probably people who have downloaded (and perhaps printed)
the pages for their own use; changing the conlang would
thus lead to a version split the same way as if Okrand
was to write and publish a new book on Klingon that
contradicts previously released matter.  Only that the
community concerned would in most cases be smaller.

>        A few years ago Sonja Kisa published
> a revision of the Toki Pona lexicon on her website,
> which narrowed the senses of some words.
> Some people, though, have continued to use words
> in the more extended sense they were originally defined
> with.  The essence here is whether people other than
> the creator are already using the conlang, not whether
> anybody is paying the author or the corporate
> entity the author did the conlang as work-for-hire for
> to get dictionaries and textbooks.
Yes.  No matter whether it is published in book form or
on the Web, whether it is with a price tag or for free,
whether the author gets paid for it or not, a revision
means that from then on there are two versions of the
conlang in circulation, which will cause trouble if the
conlang has a user community of any size.

And then there is And Rosta's nice motorcycle comparison.
A conlang that is constantly being revised is like a
motorcycle that is constantly being assembled, disassembled
and modified by its owner who never gets to ride it.
I wish to "ride my motorcycle" one day - I wish to come up
with a FINAL version of the grammar of Old Albic, accompanied
by a vocabulary that will only change in *one* way, namely
by adding new words without invalidating old ones.
I haven't reached that point yet, but I hope to reach it later
this year.  (It will be marked by the appearance of a new web
site for the language that is currently under preparation.)
That doesn't mean that my fun with Old Albic will be over then:
no, I am going to write texts in Old Albic, create new words
and idiomatic expressions, explore the culture, and develop
daughter languages.

> > To sum up: I don't think what we've stumbled on here
> > is an inherent difference between artforms by any means.
> > Rather, it's a byproduct of the artform's status in the world,
> > and could easily change if its status in the world changed.
>
> 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.
Maybe.  A novel is a work with a well-defined beginning and
ending; a language is a more open matter by its nature.
However, most of the openness of language lies in its lexicon
and text corpus, as opposed to phonology and morphology.

And it has been said that a language that doesn't change was
a dead language :)

Online publishing has made it easier to revise work already
published; yet, such revisions will always lead to a version
split because you cannot undo the old version.

>       Even if novelists had the opportunity to
> do the same as conlangers, I suspect relatively few of them
> would want to because of the nature of their artforms.
> Not none by any means, -- probably more in absolute
> numbers, as novel-writing will probably always be
> more popular than conlanging -- but relatively fewer.
Yes.  A novel is very much a "piece" of art in the classical
sense, much more so than a conlang.  Yet, a conlang has its
"core" of phonological and grammatical rules and all that.

On Sun, 10 Aug 2008 18:56:44 -0700, David J. Peterson wrote:

> 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.
Yes.  A realistic language grows with usage.  However, one can
very much strive for stability in the *rules* of the language
(i.e., in its phonology and morphosyntax) and a restriction of
changes to its lexicon to the *addition* of new words, such that
old texts are never invalidated by later changes to the language.
I already have come to regret that there are Old Albic texts in
public existence (a Babel text buried somewhere in this list's
archive, contributions to several translation relays, and a few
smaller bits) that are no longer valid in the current incarnation
of the language.  Well, that's all work in progress, and the
future new web site for Old Albic and its descendents will be
declared "canonical" by me.

> 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.
Well, Latin is "dead" only in the sense that it has no native speakers
any more and no longer changes the way living languages do.  But it
is still in use (e.g., in the Catholic church) and taught in schools.
However, many of those who use it today feel that they should not add
a shred to it, and even coining or adopting new words was illegitimate.
The result are clumsy circumlocutions for concepts of the modern world,
where it would be easy to adopt European internationalisms to the
language which are often built from Latin elements anyway (or from
Greek ones, but the Romans themselves were not afraid of borrowing
from Greek wholesale, so adopting a Greek-based internationalism will
hardly confound the language).

But a similar problem exists with published conlangs, and it is
especially virulent if the conlanger is dead, as with Tolkien's
conlangs.  (If the author is still alive, you can still ask him
what the unknown word is, how it is inflected, etc.)  There is
a deep rift in the Tolkienian linguistic community between the
"purists" and the "reconstructionists".  The latter consider it
legitimate to reconstruct unattested Quenya or Sindarin words
and word forms by linguistically informed methods (such as
reconstructing an unknown Sindarin word from its known Quenya
cognate by applying the known sound correspondences between the
two languages); the former do not.  A kind of ceasefire has been
reached by the provison that texts including reconstructed forms
are labeled "Neo-Quenya" or "Neo-Sindarin", though some purists
still feel that the prefix "Neo-" ought to be replaced by something
stronger.

And then there is the case of Volapük, which failed not only due
to its suboptimal design, but primarily due to its author's
proprietary attitude.  Schleyer claimed intellectual ownership
of his language, such that he was the only one allowed to add
new words or rules of grammar.  That of course totally defeated
the claimed purpose of the language, which was to be a means of
international communication.  No wonder that the Volapük movement
almost instantly faltered when Esperanto appeared on the scene,
which was not only better designed (in my humble opinion; discussing
that should be relegated to AUXLANG) but also had a more open-minded
author.  (Similar concerns about intellectual ownership vs. openness
led to the Loglan/Lojban split, I have been told.)

> 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.
Yes.

> 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.
A conlang that has no "canon" is an unstable conlang.  If you
change the inner workings of the language all the time, you
arrive at a corpus of ungrammatical texts.  If you want to build
up a *consistent* corpus, you must finalize at least some decisions
in the design of the language.  Words that are already in your
dictionary stay in; grammatical rules remain valid; and all that.

A conlang is indeed something like a series: at the beginning of
the series, it is not certain which course the events take, but
once an episode has been released, it is part of the canon and
later episodes ought to be consistent with it.  It is - or ought
to be - the same with conlangs.  What has been released by the
author and not designated "work in progress", becomes canon, and
later canon ought to be consistent with it.  Sure, there are ways
to "iron out" revisions.  Natlangs usually have synonyms or at
least near-synonyms; they often have several alternative ways of
expressing the same category.  In a naturalistic conlang, you
can make use such synonymies - or dialect divisions - to
retroactively canonize revisions: by declaring that *both* the
old and the new version are valid.  However, there are limits
to this.

Earlier in this thread, I compared conlangs to role-playing games.
A role-playing game usually consists of a set of rules and a
collection of facts about the game world.  Before you begin play,
the story and many details of the game world are undetermined;
they get filled in during play.  A good role-playing group should
strive, in my opinion, at internal consistency: events in new game
sessions should not contradict what has happened in earlier sessions.
And the rules should not be changed willy-nilly during play.

> 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.
Yes.  In theory, you can finish the lexicon of a non-modern
conlang as you don't have to worry about words for new concepts,
but in practice, that point will probably never be reached
within a lifetime as even stone age environments are complex
enough to involve many thousands of concepts (and pre-modern
societies had words for things we moderns are hardly aware of
because they no longer are part of our daily life).

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