Re: OT: What makes a good conlang? (was Re: Super OT: Re: CHAT: JRRT)

On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 10:53:31PM +0100, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Sat, 6 Mar 2004 18:38:58 -0000,
> And Rosta <a.rosta@...> wrote:
[...]
> > I think verisimilitude is a major ingredient of what I most value
> > in an artlang, too. How do you judge 'realism'? To me, it's mainly
> > a matter of complexity, of scale, and of completeness. The more
> > complex, the more large-scale, and the more complete it is, the
> > more realistic it is.
>
> Not necessarily.  A brief sketch can also capture a small part of
> an imagined reality quite well.  It may not look like a complete
> natlang, but like a brief sketch of a natlang.  One should not confuse
> quantity and quality, neither in conlanging nor in any other art, as
> masterful haikus on one hand and Nazi monumental buildings on the
> other hand demonstrate.  I'd always prefer a brief sketch which shows
> masterful treatment of certain details over a complete conlang which
> consists of a humdrum, obviously unreflected SAE grammar and a
> randomly generated vocabulary.
I fully agree. This is one of the main reasons I stayed away from
automatically generating Ebisédian vocabulary in any way, even though that
meant that I have to be content with its incomplete lexicon for many more
years.

[snip]
> >       On the other hand, languages that seem
> > to go beyond what is plausible for a human language, such as
> > Ebisedian and Ithkuil, I don't find realistic (though they
> > have other attractions).
>
> Ebisedian represents a language from a *very* alien universe,
> thus one should not expect it to look like a plausible human
> language.
[...]

On the other hand, it *was* designed with human speakers in mind. Though
much of the vocabulary is very alien out of necessity, since universe in
which the Ebisédi live simply is that alien, the innards of the language
itself was intended to be "realistic" in the sense of being plausibly
"intuitive" to a human speaker.

Now whether I succeeded in my intentions is another topic altogether. One
of the reasons I started to develop Tamahí, the descendent of Ebisédian,
was because I realized that, due to my inexperience when I first designed
Ebisédian, I had gone too far in letting the Ferochromon universe invade
the perceptions of the Ebisédi, and in my indulgence in exotic linguistic
features. I don't know how obvious it is from the scant Tamahí sketches
that I posted so far, but I'm basically using the excuse of language
change to revise the less savory features of Ebisédian (such as its
less-than-likely phonology) and drop features which I realize in
retrospect were too overboard. I'm still working on some core parts of
Tamahí to make it less bizarre.

(But I should say up front that I have no intentions of dropping the case
system, since it is actually quite intuitive to me. It is the one thing
that I would keep even if I dropped everything else and started from
scratch. I still consider that the reason people find it odd is simply
because we are too used to accusative typology. I did, however, drop the
instrumental case in Tamahí and introduce proper adjectives in place of
the non-verbal sentences, which I intend to completely discard.  Whether
people realize it or not, the non-verbal sentences play a much larger role
in Ebisédian's exotic feel than the case system itself, second only to the
exotic vocabulary.)

Be that as it may, I do not believe that human language is as easily
systematized as some linguists would have us believe, so I am not
apologetic in the least in saying that Ebisédian's case system is actually
quite intuitive, even if my first attempt at it may have gone a little too
far.


T

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This is not a sentence.