Re: Wittgenstein on conlanging [was Re: relative weirdness]

>From: Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg.rhiemeier@...>
>Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 02:10:42 +0100
>
<snip oodles of cool stuff>

>Esperanto started as an (empirically)
>private language; now it is used by hundreds of thousands of people,
>and it is even reported that there are native speakers of it
>(though they are only few, and all bilingual).
>Klingon,
Actually Klingon sorta has a native speaker.  One dude was rasing his son
bilingually in Klingon.  The kid was comprehending and starting to speak
Klingon when he decided to not speak in Klingon.  The dad reprots that
junior still understands and responds to Klingon, but refuses to speak it
anymore.

Quenya,
>Sindarin and several other conlangs also have their communities of
>speakers (even if few of them use the conlang in everyday-life
>situations, but rather write poetry in them or whatever), and hasn't
>_Hamlet_ been translated into Klingon?
Yes.  And so has the Epic of Gilgamesh.  And there is a literary journal,
_jatmey_ for original works in Klingon.  I've written a few haiku in Klingon
myself.  And I've written one poem in Quenya -- just to prove it could be
done.


<another MAJOR snip>

>The results of the various translation relays that have been played
>here demonstrate that conlangs are accessible to people other than
>their creators and thus aren't "private languages" in the
>Wittgensteinian
>sense.  Sure, the semantics drift quite a lot, and what comes out
>after 20 or 30 translations is quite different from the original text,
>but even after so many translations, there is still a resemblance left.
I can't wait to see what's happened to the text.

>The drift is due to the same problems that are encountered in
>translations from one natlang to the other: imperfect knowledge of
>the language translated from; words and grammatical categories
>that do not correspond semantically in a 1-by-1 way; words denoting
>concepts unique to the cultural tradition associated with a language
>(whether it is real or invented); different connotations with
>words that have the same literal meaning (to give one example from
>the current relay: the Skerre text I received contained the phrase
>_hahak-oto_ `waterways', which I *could* have translated literally
>into Germanech as _strazes a ach_, but the latter I imagine to
>have connotations of barges, canals, regulated rivers and port
>facilities - it means `waterways as traffic routes' - in Germanech,
>which makes it unsuitable in the sort of mythological text
>the relay text clearly was, so I changed it into _reivers_ `rivers').
>
Especially, after you revealed THIS!  Wow.  There have been some interesting
shifts if this is any indication. *g*

<yet another big snip>

>
> > > Well, I know that I am somewhat weird -
> >
> > All human beings have oddities about them, and none are
> > based on that fact alone warrant for persecution.
>
>Nik Taylor has a nice quote on this matter in his .sig:
>
>"There's no such thing as 'cool'.  Everyone's just a big dork or nerd,
>you just have to find people who are dorky the same way you are."
>
>(I hope you don't mind me quoting it here, Nik.)
>
>Jörg.
Yeah, I've relly enjoied that sig too.  SO true.

Adam who's glad he found you dorks.

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