Re: Linguistic knowledge and conlanging (was Explaining linguistic...)

Hallo!

On Sun, 25 Jul 2004 18:56:48 -0500,
"Mark P. Line" <mark@...> wrote:

> Jörg Rhiemeier said:
> >
> > On Sat, 24 Jul 2004 15:27:02 -0500,
> > "Mark P. Line" <mark@...> wrote:
> >
> >> Personal note: My beef has usually been with conlangers who insist that
> >> they are operating well inside of natlang evolutionary space,
> >> notwithstanding any amount of evidence to the contrary (e.g. deep center
> >> embedding, phonological conditioning of open-class suppletive
> >> allomorphy,
> >> pure ergativity, etc.). I'm becoming more mellow with age, however, and
> >> now almost always leave everybody alone. :)
> >
> > What exactly do you mean?  Fictional human languages that are not
> > plausible human languages?
>
> Yes, or ones that do not imitate human language to the degree that the
> designer intends.
Indeed, many fictional languages show such traits as ill-defined
phonologies ("the consonants are pronounced as in English, the vowels
as in Spanish" and all that), over-regular grammars, unbelievably
short words for advanced ideas, unbelievably long words for basic
concepts, violations of any number of universals, etc.
Some understanding of how languages work would soon correct
such mistakes and open a door to a whole new world of ideas.

And then there are "alien" languages that look all too human.

To return to the original topic of to which extent linguistic
scholarship is essential or detrimental to good conlanging,
I'd say that basic linguistic knowledge (of the kind one can
teach oneself from a good introductory textbook) is indeed an
eye-opener for conlangers (you quickly learn what *not* to take
for granted, and find a number of things to think about),
but little more than that is indeed relevant.  Another benefit
of basic linguistic knowledge is that a wealth of linguistic
monographs and papers become accessible to you to mine for ideas.

In fact, I did "invent" (i.e., come up with without knowing of
natlangs doing the same) many of the more "interesting" features
I use in Albic.  I "invented" suffixaufnahme for a conlang which
I designed when I was 16 years old (that's 18 years ago,
and long before I taught myself linguistics); my idea was that
a genitive is like an adjective (it modifies a noun), hence
it makes sense to inflect it like one, agreeing with the head noun
in gender, number and case.  Of course, I did not call it
`suffixaufnahme' because I didn't know the term, nor did I know
of any language doing it.  The fluid-S active-stative case marking
with degrees of volition found in Old Albic was something
I came up with when reflecting over ergativity; when I first used
it (in Nur-ellen, the predecessor of Albic), I didn't know any
natlang with an active-stative system, and I have yet to read
about a natlang with a degree-of-volition marking system like
the Albic one.

> >> I couldn't agree more. Most linguistic education sucks, as nearly as I
> >> can
> >> tell.
> >
> > I haven't undergone formal training in linguistics, but I have worked
> > through several textbooks, and picked what I found useful in conlanging.
> > What I have noticed (but what didn't surprise me) was that linguistics
> > is far less of a rigorous, exact science than, say, physics, and much
> > bad theory is in circulation.
>
> Absolutely. To paraphrase Murray Gell-Mann, linguistics is the way physics
> would be if particles could talk.
:-)

> Of course, none of the sciences are as rigorous nor as exact as many
> people believe.
Very true.

> > I whole-heartedly agree.  I think the only meaningful gauge for
> > a conlang are its own design goals.  For example, if one was to
> > present a philosophical language with self-segregating morphology
> > and a typologically unlikely phoneme inventory as a near-extinct,
> > pre-Indo-European minority language of the southeastern Alps,
> > I'd say that he has done a pathetic job of it.  But that doesn't
> > mean that the language is not excellent from some other point of view.
>
> Right. Clearly, Classical Yiklamu is the perfect conlang and cannot be
> surpassed (given a suitably narrow standard of evaluation)...
Yes!  Derivation is EVIL!!! ;-)

> > Or Old Albic would probably not be a good machine translation
> > interlingua, for example.
>
> No, you have to use Aymara for that.
Does this mean that Rick Morneau just wasted a lot of time and effort?

Greetings,

Jörg.

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