Re: Has anyone made a real conlang?

Spoke too soon.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Nowicki" <andrew@...>

> Dan Jones wrote:
> DJ> Art doesn't have to be *useful*. How *useful*,
> DJ> exactly is the Mona Lisa?
I think the Mona Lisa is something of a mystery.  Do we even know the
patron(ess)?  Traditionally, patrons had paintings made of themselves or
their wives and daughters for posterity.  In that respect, Dan, the painting
had a use for both painter and subject.  It gave an income to the painter as
well as prestige and visibility, and it had a semiotic use for the patron:
"This was me, this was my beautiful wife, while we were alive and
influential in the world."  Now that conlangs are being hung like tapestries
on the World Wide Web, they have similar uses: "this is my conlang and
intellectual and creative experiment.  What can you tell me about it that
will help me make it more pleasurable and useful to me?"  Even if it is a
secret, like Paul Burgess's mna Vanantha for so many years, it still has its
private uses.  Same for Hildegard.

> How is being viewed
> DJ> making the art *useful*? Were the cave paintings
> DJ> of Lasceaux "useless" before they were discovered.
Presumably the cave dwellers of Lasceaux meant their paintings to be viewed
if not by the rest of the tribe then by the gods they worshipped.  Today
they have a completely different use for us.

Andrew responded:
> These are not the best examples of pure art. Mona
> Lisa did not have the Nikon Coolpix camera, so she
> had to hire a painter. The Lasceaux paintings
> probably had animistic (religious) significance.
I think we know more about the painter than we know about the Mona Lisa
herself and her wishes.  We're back to these absolutes (like "pure") that
bother me.  Also, why would Da Vinci, even today, prefer a Nikon Coolpix
Camera to produce his impure art when he had a paintbrush?   None of this
makes sense to me.  Painting and photography are different art forms.
Phrases like "pure art" are a little meaningless.  More on the utility of
artlangs: mine gives me pleasure, and it has led me to the discovery not
only to resources within myself, but to other languages, to articles and
book projects, and to the brilliant people on this list.

> By the way, I took close-up pictures of three women,
> one of them today. All of the women were shaken to
> the bone by the prominent wrinkles shown in the digital
> photos.
I prefer celluloid in order to do artistic justice to my subjects.  And
then, of course, it depends on what one means by artistic justice.
Contrast?  Composition?  The play of light and shadow?  Capturing what is
extraordinary in a person's face?  Surely it should be more than just
feeding the vanity of some women.

> These photos are totaly useless to them unless
> the wrinkles are removed (retouched).
Well, useless only if older women want to look younger.  We can't assume
from this that the Mona Lisa asked Leonardo to improve her defects.  Or that
she even had any say in the matter.  Or that all women are terrified of
their wrinkles.  Or that all artists are invested in removing them.

> British queen
> Elisabeth went as far as making stencils for painters
> to improve the beauty of her images. If Mona Lisa had
> had the Nikon Coolpix camera, she would have hired
> a painter anyway, because painters do not paint wrinkles.
They don't???   Look at Rembrandt.  Look at any number of contemporary
realist painters. Andrew Wyeth.  A lot of Paul Cadmus.  "X does not do Y."
"You guys don't create 'real' conlangs."  These absolutes bother me.  But
we've been there, already.

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."