Re: Necessity of Conculture?

Chris Peters <alpha_leonis@...> wrote:
>         I'm curious what the rest of you think about attaching a fictional culture
> to your languges.  My language "Ricadh" so far has been mostly a linguistic
> experiment, a way of playing around with the principles of the art.  But
> reading some conlangs I've seen on the web, they almost without exception
> include a description of the "hidden culture" or "alien race" that speaks
> it.
>         But is it possible to go the other way?  To create a language for its own
> sake?  What do the rest of y'all think?  How important is that conculture,
> as a part of the art of the conlang?
>
When I begin a new conlang project, I usually try to keep
it isolated from "external influences", at least while I
create the phonology and outline the grammar. But sooner or
later I end up creating a culture for it. Not because it's
necessary, but because I need to place my conlang on a firm
base: I want to know who speaks it, the general character of
the speakers, so as to create a language that goes with it.
Sometimes it happens the other way round: I imagine a culture,
so then I have to create a language for it, because people
in that culture will think in their own language, not in
English or Spanish. In any case, the culture provides me
a lot of ideas for the language, and the language becomes
richer.

I guess it's possible to create an artlang without a culture
or the other way round, but I see them as a group -- a part
that cannot exist without the whole, and a whole that can't
be such without the part. That's my opinion, of course; I too
sometimes want to experiment _in abstracto_ with a language,
but I feel obliged to make a culture -- compulsive behaviour,
they call it: I've lost the ability to keep things apart. :)


--Pablo Flores