Re: What is it we are saying in our languages?

On 7/2/06, Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:

> both.  In other words, what are we saying that is unique in our languages,
> and how do our languages help us *say* something that the world can hear--
> or deem unique?
....
> though.  Are there any of you who want to say something new in new,
> unheard-of words?  And by "new" I mean a text of some import or poetry
> (since, as Qoholeth has said, "there is nothing new under the sun").  Which
> of you write copiously in your conlangs because you have something to say
> rather than construct?
In the first conlang I made that I still feel mostly
pleased with, Thauliralau, I wrote a version of the
Thau' creation myth (which I had earlier written
in English).  I had plans to write other myths
in Thauliralau, and in the other conlangs of
the Caligoi, but never got around to it; none of the
other languages in that conworld got much
beyond the sketch stage in the next couple of
years, and I was getting busier with college.

In 1998 I started creating gjâ-zym-byn, and by
mid-1999 I was starting to use it a little bit for
the purpose I made it for: writing my journal,
which I had been keeping since 1988.  As I
developed gzb's expressive power and developed
my own fluency in it, I started using it more
often and English less often -- though even at
periods of peak gzb usage, I've never gone more
than a month or so without some use of English
or Esperanto in my journal.

The effects of using gzb have been at least
twofold:

1. When in a phase of using gzb for the journal,
I tend to write more numerous and shorter entries,
focusing on describing details of my daily life that
I would simply omit from the longer, less frequent
English entries.

2. Also, I've written about kinds of things in gzb
that I  haven't written about in English [or Esperanto]
for other reasons: things annoying or embarrassing
that I would find it harder to talk about in any
other language.  The knowledge that no one else
knows gzb means that writing in it is as private
as thinking

Besides some hundreds of journal entries, I've
written a few original short-short stories and
dialogues -- some linguistically
interesting, but flawed as stories -- and made
some stabs at original poetry, only one of which
(free alliterative verse with Hebrew-like parallelism)
I really feel happy with.  More recently I've tried
to write some alliterative poems with actual
meter, but haven't managed to make them work.
I've also written some prayers in gzb, mostly
short.

> newness of morphology.  What is it we are *saying* in our invented
> languages? or in inventing language period?  That's another question.  How
> is conlanging itself a kind of message about language?
"English", or "French", or "Ojibway" or
any other convenient name for a natural language
is an abstraction: a name for the common properties
of thousands or millions of more or less
mutually comprehensible idiolects.  Writers generally
write in their own idiolect; the better ones can
switch idiolects, to some extent, in writing dialogue
or first-person narration for characters who talk in distinct ways.
Many writers will more or less
deliberately shape the idiolect they write in,
for their works in general or for each particular
work.  In other words, high-level writing in
natural languages (including, for this purpose,
Esperanto any any other conlangs that have
speaker communities and literature)
and original writing (even if not on a very
high level) in a conlang are similar in some
important respects; in both cases, the artist
is concerned not just with pragmatically getting
a message across by re-using whatever
bits of language are lying around handy,
but with saying what they have to say in
the best way, re-examining assumptions
about how they use language in order to
craft the idiolect this particular work must
be written in.

But maybe we can say there's a continuum
from writers who primarily want to reach
a wide audience, and are willing to trim
their linguistic ambitions to make the message
comprehensible to more people, to those
who care most about making the language
fit the message perfectly, even if it reduces
the audience considerably.  (This could vary
with the same writer on different occasions.)
Writers like Jack Vance or Avram Davidson
would be near the wide-audience end of the
scale, James Joyce and Anthony Burgess
(at least in certain works) at the midpoint,
and conlangers writing in their conlangs at
the far end.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/gzb/gzb.htm