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

Hallo!

On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 14:54:31 -0700, David J. Peterson wrote:

> The notion of something being "finished" is defined by the
> audience and the method of publication.  If you branch out
> into the world of television or serial novels, "finished" is roughly
> equivalent to the notion of "canon".
Yes.

> [...]
>
> With conlangs, publishing is, essentially, the web.
Certainly.  More than 99% of all conlangs never get printed,
let alone shown on the screen big or small.

>       And
> since few if any will notice that the definition for a given
> word changed, we can keep tinkering forever without
> constraints.
Indeed.  Web pages can be changed with little effort, and in
the case of most conlang web pages, hardly anyone would notice
(depending on the magnitude of the change, of course).

>       If grammars and dictionaries for conlangs
> became marketable entities, they would become canon.
Yes.  As has happened with Klingon, and to a degree also with
Quenya and Sindarin (the fragmentary attestation of the latter
two causing a deep rift between those Quendanists who consider
it legitimate to reconstruct unattested word forms and those
who don't, all aside from the problem of which version of the
constantly-revised _Quenta Silmarillion_ and other legacy
writings of Tolkien to consider "canonical").

> It's much harder to change a definition if it's been published
> in a print volume owned by thousands of people than
> if the dictionary exists only on your computer and/or
> website.  If such a thing did happen, conlangs would
> suddenly feel like bounded projects--if anything, similar
> to a card game or fiction series. [...]
Exactly.  A printed book is a finished work; a presentation
on the Web, less so, and posts to fora such as this one are
merely "work in progress".

>       Think of Klingon.  Okrand could
> publish a new dictionary with new words, but do you
> really think he could change a significant part of the
> grammar, or maybe suggest that new word for "language"
> be tlhIS, not Hol?  How would all the Trek fans worldwide
> react?  I honestly think his change would have no
> effect--they'd stick with what was already established.
> In a sense, the language's history has more power at
> this point than its creator.
Any attempt to revise Klingon that way would likely cause a split
- there will be *two* conlangs (original and revised Klingon), not
one.  What a mess.  Of course, there are indeed points, I have
been told, where Klingon canon (i.e., Klingon materials written
by Okrand himself) contradicts other parts of Klingon canon, and
Okrand had to iron those creases away by inventing yet another
dialect variation.

With Old Albic (and its future descendants), I am planning to
create what can perhaps be called an "open canon": what gets put
on my website is meant to last, and I will avoid changes to it.
But I will certainly add more and more stuff as time progresses.
Everything on the language which I have released so far (and this
includes the FrathWiki page http://wiki.frath.net/Old_Albic ) is
work in progress, though the latter page is something like a
"final draft" which will be re-worded in places, but the grammar
presented there will stand, though it needs more elaboration and
expansion in places.

> 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.
Right.  As for now, most conlangs exist only in media that allow
for easy changes.  But that is not a property of the artform
itself, rather a result of its marginal status in our society.
However, a few conlangs have achieved "classical" status in the
community despite all this, and any change that invalidates
previously-published material will cause at least some upheaval.
Examples are Brithenig, Teonaht, Verdurian and several others.

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