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

----- Original Message -----
From: "And Rosta" <and.rosta@...>


>> Maybe the medium is itself the message.  The structure, the efficacy, the
>> 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?
>
> Mainly, I think, the medium is the message, but it's still a very
> meaningful message: a language is a kind of diagrammatical map of thought,
> or a code for expressing the mind's diagrammatical map of the world.
Much agreed.  And that it shapes our world, too.

> As for using one's own conlang: there are three main purposes that I have
> meditated over the years, none of which are likely to come to fruition.
>
> 1. Poetry. I write poetry in English and frequently find the vast lexical
> resources of English insufficient to provide exactly the word I need, one
> with the right meaning, perhaps in combination with the right sound, and
> perhaps with secondary echoes of other meanings through lexical
> associations.
<

I think this is the great struggle and challenge of poetry for all poets.

>
 The ineluctable ambiguities of English are also a frustration. I've often
wished Livagian were in a fit state for me to write in it: the ambiguity
problems would vanish, and I'd be free to invent a word that exactly fits
the requirements of the occasion. But it will be a long long time before
Livagian is usable for this purpose, and I have too little to say in poetry
for the impulse to write in Livagian to wax.
<

Writing poetry is difficult enough in one's native language; how much more
difficult must it be in one's created language that hasn't completely come
together yet.  I don't yet have an established poetic "style" for Teonaht.
Nor does my life give me the leisure to develop it.

> 2. Erotica. It would be good to be able to write graphically about sexual
> acts without having to deal with the problems of English's sexual
> vocabularies (variously too euphemistic, too clinical, too polluted by use
> as maledicta). A conlang would solve this problem. But the appetite for
> such things wanes, I find, with middle age...
<

Ahhh!  Well, yes, but not entirely.  The intellectual challenge is almost
irresistable, and I sometimes find that writing eros reverses the apathies
of age.  I was put up to it years ago when Boudewijn Rempt challenged me to
translate one of his extremely frank but beautiful DenDen brothel poems.
Then he translated my translation back into DenDen.  It was accepted for
publication in an erotica issue of HazMat, but that voakharot of an editor
fukked the whole thing up so that the issue was never published.  I
understand what you mean by "polluted by maledicta."  :)

> 3. Philosophy. I have felt similarly to John Q:
>> It has always been my intention to write philosophical poetry in Ithkuil,
>> i.e., a poem or poems expressing a philosiphical view.  Because Ithkuil's
>> raisons d'etre include (1) semantic exactitude and precision, (2) overt
>> expression of actual cognition than natlangs permit, and (3)
>> morpho-phonological conciseness, I believe it to be an excellent vehicle
>> for
>> expressing "heavy" philosophical thoughts and musings in a way that would
>> hinder the speaker/writer from trying to manipulate language
>> metaphorically
>> the way most philosophy is written.  [...] The result being a more "pure"
>> (pardon the metaphor!) expression of philosophical thought that can be
>> judged on its face more objectively than most philosophical writings.
>
> Except that, in my case, I do not have philosophical thoughts of
> sufficient profundity and originality that I feel impelled to take pains
> to verbalize them. Much as I might labour to smooth the block of marble
> that is Livagian, there is no accompaniment of lapidary thoughts to
> inscribe upon it...
<

I suspect, And, that you are as exacting of yourself as you are of
Livagian-- and of your poetry, and that for you the mills of creation grind
slow but grind exceeding fine.  Just look at your command of English:
smoothing the block of marble that is Livagian.  You touch on something that
goes back 800 years: Hildegard prayed in a letter that Christ apply the
pumice stone to her Lingua and make it a fit sound for men.  No lapidary
thoughts?  Express what you just did in Livagian, when it is time, and you
will have started a monument.

I think what many of us are expressing, here, is a sense of coming late to
that monument, or finding that it is bigger than we can build and heavier
than we can hoist.  I wish I had somehow "started" my Teonaht earlier.  I
started early, but not in any sophisticated way.  I am envious of those few
I know who are fluent in their languages because they started making it a
familiar one early on, or have the genius for quick memorization.

Sally