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@...>

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