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

Hallo!

On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 16:24:42 -0400, Jim Henry wrote:

> 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.
Yes.  Roleplaying is more akin to fiction writing and theater than
to conlanging.  The comparison I drew was based on the notion that
in both roleplaying and conlanging, you work with a set of rules
that are codified in the beginning and from there on you engage in
an open-ended creative activity guided by those rules.

> 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?
I also have no idea how this could work.  The main use of conlangs
in role-playing games is as part of the setting, and that in praxi
mainly for the purpose of arriving at consistent naming schemes for
characters, places, etc.  It is, however, impractical to have
players actually speak the languages of their characters :)

> [...]
>
> 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 once made up a consonant inventory with more than 300 phonemes,
just for fun; I never used it in an actual conlang, though, because
the thing was just too unwieldy.  The phoneme inventory of what was
to become Old Albic never was even nearly that large.

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