Re: OT: Tinkering versus creativity

Pardon me for piggy-backing off your message like this, Sai, but I had one
more thought to add to the two messages I posted last night.  To return to
the exceedingly slow grinding of the mills metaphor, it seems to me that
human invention is a little bit like evolution and geology, developing
slowly at times, running along its well-worn rivers until the ice dam breaks
in the Scablands, sending great lakes of water into the sea.  Then we are
off on a new course.  The meteor that killed off the dinosaurs but aided the
development of mammals.  The invention of the horseless carriage, based on
the horse and carriage, the mining of petroleum to fuel it, the population
explosion, the build up of CO2 in the atmosphere, the warming of the earth,
the eventual melting of Greenland and the plunging of Northern Europe into a
new Ice Age.  Technology and geology, evolving together slowly and quickly,
no one factor without the other, Mykwid and Dohhdakra.  Ditto
"tinkering/creativity."

Sally
Rin Elep li Kyam, or "Book of Order"
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/mykwid.html

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sai Emrys" <sai@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2006 2:09 PM
Subject: Re: OT: Tinkering versus creativity


> 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
>