Re: SemiOT: Revealing your conlanger status, personal experiences of reaction...
| From: | Sally Caves <scaves@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, June 18, 2004, 17:37 |
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Roger Mills" <rfmilly@...>
> BTW "SemiOT" makes a remarkably apopos heading.
Doesn't it!!
>> Surely any conlang that is exposed to public scrutiny (e.g. here) ceases
to
> be "private" in Wittgenstein's sense-- his I think might better be thought
> of as "(secret) codes".
Well, actually not, Roger, because even "secret codes" could be taught and
learned. Wittgenstein means private words for completely subjective
experience. His point is that even our most subjective experiences can only
be expressed in the public realm by a series of conventional signs that
strip away private subjectivity. That's why a "private language" is
unteachable. W. uses "private language" as an abstraction for solipsism.
The private signification of the incommunicable self. Used language, he
writes, can't work that way. We understand "sadness," "earache," "nausea,"
"nostalgia" only because our culture has provided us with these public
words. We assume our subjective experiences to be well or not-so-well
expressed by them. (Ever try to describe to a doctor what it feels like for
everything to be "going slow"? It's as if I've said to him, it feels as if
the world domai fan. He's gobsmacked. He trots out the words
"depersonalization" and "anxiety." How does that help me?) We don't know
what "nostalgia" means for every individual person. Or even the sense of
red. We can't get inside someone's head; public language is an imperfect
communicator, and for W. it is the only communicator.
That's why Dan's remarks are so interesting in his post--for all language
there is a continuum of personal and public meaning--, along with his
comments about schizophrenia and ideoglossia or other speech pathologies.
These are people who can't enter the speaking public in normative ways; they
exist on the private end of the continuum. If W. has addressed this, I
haven't encountered it. But I don't think he means "private language" to be
a language at all except in a theoretical realm that he *rejects.*
> The underlying assumption of every conlang I've
> seen is that it could indeed be a real language, spoken _somewhere_ by
some
> society, however strange it may be (vide Teoh's Ebisedi!!). Thus all our
> con-words are "agreed upon publicly", and our languages are learnable,
> should anyone want to take the trouble.
Exactly. And that's what we're all aiming for on this list with our
discussions and questions and explications: making our conlangs legible to
others.
Nwetis firrimby, Roger! :):)
Sal
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