Re: OT: Tinkering versus creativity

Hmm. I wasn't aware of AllNoun or other experiments until after I
created Kelen. But the idea of violating a universal occured to me
immediately after I learned that there were universals.

As to tinkering vs creativity, I think that if there is a distinction,
then tinkering is the forebearer of creativity. Creativity requires
tinkering and patience. (And probably a lot of other things.) It takes
the patience of tinkering with known things over and over to find the
anomalies that lead to innovations and new discoveries. So, yeah, I
agree with Sally that it is really all tinkering.

-S

On 6/27/06, And Rosta <and.rosta@...> wrote:
> 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@...>
> >>
> >
> >
>

--
Sylvia Sotomayor
terjemar@gmail.com
www.terjemar.net