Re: OT: Artlanging is now mainstream

----- Original Message ----
> From: David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...>
> If the type of the language is dependent on the goals or intentions
> of the creator, then there could be infinitely many schools or
> conlang types.
Precisely. Theoretically, an artlang for another planet ought to be liberated from IE
restrictions, but a specific commercially-minded author may also be concerned
about reader accessibility; make the language TOO foreign, and it will just be
characters on a page to be stumbled through. People devising conlangs for their
personal enjoyment or as thought experiments are bound by different parameters
than people interested in mainstream fiction popularity, and so on.

It also strikes me that this individual wants to throw the linguistic baby out
with the language-specific bathwater. Starting from total scratch is well and
good as a thought experiment, but there are likely some universals to how
sentient creatures intercommunicate. If there were some clear list of
characteristics that all human languages have (say, words-for-things and
words-for-actions, for instance), would such a list apply to ALL sentient
communication, or are some of them accidental to the human experience?

For that matter, he appears to be ignoring that the person he's railing about made
a language for cats, while Tolkein made languages for (predominantly)
humanoids, so insisting that Tolkien and the cat-writer follow the same
strategies is short-sighted.

So, my opinion: The website linked to isn't worth much in isolation, but I do
think it's interesting to think about how artlangs are limited either by the
intended speakers of the language or the intentions of the creator.

-- Paul

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