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

Hallo!

On Fri, 8 Aug 2008 01:16:31 -0400, Jim Henry wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
> wrote:
>
> > A friend of a friend of mine once said, "Art is when someone says
> > 'Now'."  There is a point in most works of art when the artist
> > declares it finished and refrains from further additions.  Art
> > always means to choose what to do and what NOT to do.
>
> Without disagreeing with you and Ray that Andrew should probably
> refrain from major changes in Brithenig, I wonder whether the saying
> you quoted really applies to artlangs in general, and whether, if it
> doesn't, that has anything to say about how conlanging differs
> fundamentally from other artforms.
Sure.  There is art which exists as a *process* without a
definable endpoint.  Yet, many processes of artistic creation
eventually reach a point of time when the artist decides that
his work was finished and he'd not add another stroke.

An artlang indeed is never really finished; there are always
more words to coin and usually also gaps in the grammar to
fill as the author proceeds in composing texts in it.  Yet,
at least I feel that things need to be settled at a lower
level of the structure (e.g., phonology) before one can
expect to make much progress somewhere higher (e.g.,
morphology).  It is always difficult to change things at
the bottom if there is much being built up upon it.

I also should have stated that I myself think that that FOAF's
statement needs to be qualified.  That guy had some rather
radical ideas of art, and some of his art is indeed quite
radical, too - he'd take a canvas, paint it solid green, and
then write a lengthy manifesto on what that painting is meant
to express :)

> I suppose many of us who work one one conlang long-term, whether
> engelang or artlang or even auxlang,will never consider it really
> finished.
Sure; see above.

>       One of our ideal goals, which we can never reach in a
> single lifetime, is to make it as expressive as the typical natlang.
> Unless we start out with a severe degree of simplicity in the grammar
> as one of the design goals, we may never be finished with the grammar,
> and unless we start out with oligosynthesis or oligoisolation as a
> design principle, we'll never be finished with the vocabulary.  The
> open-endedness of our goal of maximum expressivity doesn't necessarily
> mean we keep tinkering with existing parts of the language; but it
> does mean we can never say it's finished in the way a novelist or
> painter says he's finished with a novel or painting.  There's always
> another species of beetle you haven't got a name for yet.
Certainly.  A conlang is never ever finished.  It grows with use.
Languages are by their nature big and complex systems, and there
is always something left to be covered.  Even a closed-vocabulary
scheme like Toki Pona is never "finished" - while one can say that
the language will never gain more lexemes, there are still more
semantemes to be added in the form of idiomatic compounds.  The
word list and the grammar of Toki Pona won't tell you how to
translate, say, "morphosyntactic alignment" into TP.

Yet, in order to make any progress in making a conlang, you
eventually have to make some basic decision that are not subject
to revision.  You have to decide which phonemes to use before you
can move on to anything else, for instance.  There are conlangers
who constantly revise even the most basic elements of their
conlang, sure; but those never get anywhere near being able to
"use" their conlang.  As And Rosta once put it, they are like a
motorcyclist who constantly assembles, diassembles and modifies
his motorcycle without ever getting to ride it.  *I* wish to
"ride my motorcycle"!

> 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
introduce house rules and change the world's history, just as
someone can go and build a conlang derived from Brithenig.)

> >> Grammatically I consider Brithenig a closed canon.  Lexically I'm still
> >> researching words and phrases for translation exercises.
>
> Novelists, for instance, occasionally do second editions of their
> novels (James Branch Cabell, J.R.R. Tolkien);
And painters occasionally paint several different versions of their
paintings; etc.

>       but I've never heard of
> one saying something equivalent to this, like "I may keep making
> slight additions to the worldbuilding detail until I die, but the plot
> and characters aren't going to change".  That doesn't mean that
> conlanging is a better or worse kind of artform than literature (let's
> not open that can of worms again) but it may tell us something about
> how they differ.
Concurred.  It is meaningless to say that one artform was superior
to another artform, and even comparative judgements of works within
the same field are bound to be subjective.  Let's keep that can of
worms firmly closed.

> To return to another point,
>
> > Art always means to choose what to do and what NOT to do.
>
> I agree that applies to artlanging (and engelanging insofar as it can
> be an art or craft) as much as to any other kind of art, even though I
> disagree that (baring certain unusual goals or design principles) an
> artlang should at some point be considered finished and left in an
> unchanging state thereafter.
Sure.  What Andrew meant was, I think, that he was not going to
revise the phonological and morphosyntactic *structure* of Brithenig,
but he'll very much continue *using* the language, i.e. compose new
texts in it, which entails adding new *words* to it.  That is also
what I meant when I quoted my friend's friend.

>       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'": I decided that those phonemes were the phonemes of Old Albic,
and it has been at that ever since.  If I was to change this phoneme
inventory, I'd have to change so many things I have built up on it
since then: the phonotactics, the morphology, the 1000-something
words in my lexicon, etc.  No, the phoneme inventory has been fixed
for about five years by now, and I am not going to change it.  The
grammar is also quite advanced by now; what has already been laid
out won't be subject to major changes, though there is certainly
still something to be added.  And the lexicon, of course, is an
eternally open matter.

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