Re: OT: Tinkering versus creativity

"Thinking outside the box" is a cliche, And.  I was not being reductive,
trivializing or uninsightful.  I was being sardonic, ;) and trying to point
out, as I have in my previous posts, a basic truth: that even "thinking
outside the box" is based on a prior box.  Maybe you could revisit my
analogies with geology and evolution that were not sardonic.  True, humans
think and nature does not (or so we assume), and some humans think better
and more originally than others and manage to change the landscape.  Is that
really what we're trying to do in personal artlangs?  I liked your other
comment better: that the lust for novelty arises from an impoverished
sensibility, and that innovation was not a criterion for you in your
appreciation of an artlang.  Surely there are subtleties in artlangs, like
streets in a city, that make that city and that artlang novel to those who
live in it.  See my other post on this matter.  God is in the details.
Another cliche, but there it is.

Sally

----- Original Message -----
From: "And Rosta" <and.rosta@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2006 6:13 PM
Subject: Re: OT: Tinkering versus creativity


> While it is true that the senses of 'original', e.g. as in 'original
> idea', include both 'an idea that nobody else has ever had before' and 'an
> idea of X's that X has not borrowed from somebody else', both those senses
> are rather reductive, trivializing, uninsightful and problematic. Surely
> more pertinent is the sense of 'original' that is nowadays called
> 'thinking outside the box'. Sai was lauding conlangs that think outside
> the box (but he was not, let us be clear, implicitly criticizing ones that
> don't, which patently often have an entirely different but equally rich
> array of merits).
>
> --And.
>
> Sally Caves, On 27/06/2006 22:14:
>> Yes... for example, AllNoun preceded Sylvia's Kelen.  So did a variety of
>> language experiments--Ray's filled me in there.  Sylvia may not have
>> known about these, but it was still in osmosis, so to speak, in that some
>> inventors have tried to break some kind of universal about language.
>> I've even thought of a language that did away with nouns and was all
>> verbs and adjectives.  I'm sure I'm not original. Musical language?  Lots
>> of people, including myself, thought we'd come up with something original
>> (wow! a language based on musical staves!) only to find that Francis
>> Godwin had invented Lunarian in _The Man in the Moone_ (1668), with a
>> language based on musical staves.
>>
>> So I suppose, if you factor in the "ignorance" element, all of us who
>> came up with the idea of inventing a personal language prior to our
>> having heard of any other such creators including Tolkien are being
>> "creative."  But I tend to agree with David and Mark and others on this
>> subject: it's all tinkering with a few explosions here and there, but you
>> can't separate the explosions from the tinkering.  What would be the
>> point?  We live and create in a vast continuum of human life and
>> invention.  Isn't it strange how suddenly a bunch of people will start
>> musing about a certain "new" idea independently of one another?
>>
>> Sally
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Reed" <markjreed@...>
>> To: <CONLANG@...>
>> Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2006 2:28 PM
>> Subject: Re: OT: Tinkering versus creativity
>>
>>
>>> You can try all you want to do something entirely novel in your
>>> conlang, but chances are you will fail.  Things only appear novel when
>>> you're ignorant of their antecedents.  There's nothing *wholly* new
>>> under the sun, and *all* creative endeavors are, at some level, "just"
>>> tinkering with known elements. The distinction can only be made in
>>> ignorance and is imo worthless.
>>>
>>> On 6/27/06, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:
>>>> On 6/26/06, Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:
>>>> > I'm also slightly annoyed by his demand that we ask "what evidence it
>>>> would
>>>> > take to prove our beliefs wrong."  I come from a school of thought
>>>> that
>>>> > prefers the dialectic to the binary--thesis, antithesis, synthesis,
>>>> > rather
>>>> > than off, on, zero one, right, wrong.  I guess I run on analog.
>>>>
>>>> Just as a short note - I don't see that he necessarily is binary at
>>>> all - nor for that matter that his challenge is. (It's clearly
>>>> directed, imo, at religious folk with tautological / closed-loop
>>>> belief systems...)
>>>>
>>>> He is making a distinction between tinkering and creativity, or
>>>> tinkering and neogenesis perhaps. One could call them both 'creative'
>>>> in some sense, but I feel that the distinction is a worthwhile one,
>>>> and reflected in how most folk do conlanging - by hearing about how
>>>> some language does X, and incoprorating it or a small variation
>>>> thereof. This, rather than thinking of entirely new ways of doing X,
>>>> or choosing not to do X at all (viz. Kelen), or otherwise going
>>>> outside of the usual scope of language.
>>>>
>>>> Which, as I said, is of course a plenty wide scope to start with. But
>>>> I'm never one to be content with it just 'cause of that. :-p
>>>>
>>>>  - Sai
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
>>>
>>
>>
>

Replies