Re: Constructive linguistics

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Grossmann" <jimg4732@...>

> Hello!
>
> I don't see the artlang becoming the subject of an academic discipline any
> time soon either.
Wow!  What is this post in response to?  Did I miss or delete something?

> As others have pointed out, conlangs are probably irrelevant to academic
> linguistics.
Weeks ago?  I was nomail, then.

> FWIU (from what I understand), they aren't useful in testing
> the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis.
So what?  Isn't that a little over-rated?

  FWIU, despite the fact that some conlangs
> violate alleged linguistic universals, conlangs have yet to confront
> linguists with phenomena that are as interesting as a) grammatical
> structures found in natural languages or b) hypothetical nonce-grammars
> that
> could be generated using sophisticated mathematics/computer models.
True.  They are of interest to scholars in other domains, though.
Philosophy for one thing.  Psychology for another.

> As for the humanities, I think that artngs stand at odds with the aims of
> traditional literature, which generally aspires to express the most
> individual outlooks in ways that make them interesting to a larger
> population.   In the process of conlanging, facts that are already
> interesting to a large population (everyone from professional linguists to
> weekend language-trivia buffs) are used in the service of an almost purely
> private endeavor.
How do you explain, then, Rasula and McCaffrey's _Imagining Language_?  Or
the popularity of Eco's _Search for the Perfect Language_?  Or Tolkien as
literature, including some of his Elvish songs?  True, those enthusiasts are
in a definite minority, I'll grant you that, but they are there.

> Witness our own list.   We share information that, in one way or another,
> is
> helpful to the individual conlanger.  We share information about natlangs,
> linguistic theory, whether or not something has already been done in a
> conlang, and solutions to problems that arise in conlanging.
> We help conlangers do their thing.
>
> What we don't do is acquire significant expertise in each other's
> conlangs.
> There's nothing wrong with that.  I'd rather have some help in building my
> own conlang than spend two years learning to speak and read and write in
> someone else's.  So would a lot of other people.
That's because one of the profiles of a conlanger is that he works in
isolation, basically.  What interests him is the production of his OWN
unique conlang.  That's also because of the very nature of this art: it
cannot be easily acquired.  Composers learn and play the compositions of
other composers.  Artists go to galleries and look at other artists' work.
Writers read other writers' novels.  But acquiring a language takes a lot
longer.  It's a pity that our brains are not wired for rapid learning of a
language (I know a few people who are exceptions, though), but the best
remedy for that is total immersion.  So conlanging in its present condition
makes that impossible: how are we to acquire another artist's invented
language when there are a) relatively few soundbytes--I could count on a
hand and a half the conlangers who post .mp3 samples on their pages, and
even that isn't enough; b) no global environment to practice it in,
including other speakers of the language?

In an Internet future, I imagine a much better technical environment.
Perhaps virtual reality, the ability to create virtual persons that will
converse with you, take you through an invented city, introduce you to the
activities there, correct your mistakes.
Imagining getting to design something like that through Dreamweaver Virtual
Plus!

> All I'm saying is that it's hard to imagine an academic study of
> conlanging
> as literature when even the practitioners of conlanging know only their
> own
> conlangs and don't seem to need  opinions about the tendencies, virtues,
> and
> values embodied across conlangs.
Again, I'm interested in the source of this post. Conlanging as literature,
now?

> In fairness to artlangers who do have literary aspirations, artlang poetry
> and prose has, IMO, more to recommended it than so-called "language
> poetry"
> which, AFAIK, isn't written in any language.
Including, among many things, the weird phenomenon of Zaum.  And of course,
any musical presentation of a conlang, such as Urban Trad and Ekova.  There,
of course, the music is what speaks to the auditor.

  More than this, perhaps the
> *act* of inventing an artlang could be seen as a kind of performance art;
> an artistic assertion of individuality, a refusal to be swallowed up by
> the
> world at large.
> Personally, I've always thought of conlanging as a craft, like scrimshaw.
> Or model railroad building, as Jeff Henning suggested?
>
> I like the model railroad analogy to a point--but it has one defect.  A
> model railroad mimics, as much as possible, that thing that it's a model
> of.
> The topography can be purely imaginary, and the route unnaturally short,
> but
> otherwise, the more realistic the model train set, the more esteemed it
> is.
True.  Or the miniature house.  I've seen miniatures that amazed me: the one
I liked best was a miniature Green and Green house, with details so minute
that it knocked my eyes out of my head: the water stain in the little retro
sink, for instance.  The little black and white hexagonal tiles in the
bathroom, one of them missing.  The persian rug in the study.  The worn
carpet on the stairs.

> There isn't any tradition that constrains conlanging in this way.
What about Tolkien, though?  He seemed very constrained, compared to what
you speak of below.  And there are a host of conlangs devoted to this kind
of realistic restraint.  Ill Bethisad?

> Hence our discussion about putting tenses on nouns instead of verbs.
> Hence
> the fact that a conlang is not considered less worthy if it lacks the kind
> of irregular forms typically found in natural languages.  Hence attempts
> to
> design conlangs with more cases or conjugations than one finds in any
> natural language.
An analogy in the art world would be fantasy art, perhaps, or surrealism.

> Yes, with enough knowledge of real languages, we can strive to write a
> conlang reference grammar that could pass for the reference grammar of an
> obscure dialect or the recently discovered descendent of some dead
> language.
> We can do that, but we don't have to.
Having to do it seems irrelevant, though.  What do you mean?  (This seems to
be a reference to something I missed)

> Yes, with enough knowledge of the current linguistics literature, we can
> strive to create a unique language whose reference grammar could,
> nonetheless, pass as the reference grammar for a natural human language.
> We can do that, but we don't have to.
Again, what do you mean by "we don't have to"? Are you speaking of art vs.
scholarship?

> If model railroad building were more like conlanging,
SOME conlanging...

> the signs could be
> replaced with scary idols, the station could look like a psychedelic
> seashell, the ties on the tracks could be colorful little things with
> runes
> painted on them, and the trains could be wheeled ovoids and/or polyhedrons
> adorned with feathers, fur, scales, or miniature roofing shingles, along
> with the occasional eyes and antennae.   Or the set could look more
> realistic, but that would be up to the model builder.
Hmmm.  All very intriguing remarks, Jim.  I'm put in mind of _Robot_, an
animated film yet to come out which already has a book on it at Borders.  It
imagines a world of robots, where everything is made of metal, but imitates
natural cities, and natural landscapes, and of course human beings.
Everything is slightly retro; everything has a machine orientation, and yet
it is strangely beautiful and endlessly intriguing.

Or even better: Dark City, by Alex Proyas.  Here is a city afloat in space,
but invented by aliens.  It is meant to imitate a real human city, but it is
cartoonish and nightmarish, and for some reason fascinating to me.  Nothing
quite fits: the cars, the telephones, the automats, are all from various
decades, and it is eternally night.  Roads won't get you to Shell Beach.
I've often mused that a conlang is a little like this: it is incomplete in
the way this city is; it is invented in the way this city is; and it is
always under a false and magical kind of construction: buildings suddenly
torque up out of the ground and everything is shifted, the people's memories
redesigned to think that the world is the same as it was.

My own conculture is meant to imitate human cities, and yet I deliberately
try to make it exotic.  I want people who visit it to feel as though they
are in something foreign, and I want my constructed language to give them
the same sense of having met with foreigners.  And yet, like Dark City, it
imitates familiar things.

I imagine that the Elvish languages and worlds of Tolkien had the same
effect on people who first met them.  I don't think conlanging as an art is
dead, YET... it may become so common to us that we think it is.  But we are
immersed in it.

Sally/Sarah

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