Re: Necessity of Conculture?

Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> Chris Peters wrote:
> >         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?
>
> Depends.  If it's intended to be naturalistic, it really helps to have
> at least some idea of the people who speak it, what their values are and
> the like.  Thus, an egalitarian culture would have no use for varying
> levels of formality, as in Spanish tu'/usted, but a strictly
> hierarchical culture would.  But, there's certainly nothing wrong with
> just creating a language as a purely personal thing, that's what an
> "artlang" is.  It's just a matter of personal taste, I think.  I prefer
> to have a conculture behind my conlang, but others don't.
Nik is right; you can do whatever you want, Chris!  Anything goes on
this list except flames!  I believe Tolkien started out, or so he said,
inventing the language first and the culture afterwards.  He invented
the
culture so that he could put the language in context, and that's always
a good thing... but time, time, time-consuming.  If you stick with this
project, it will have a way of taking its own track.

Sally
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/whatsteo.html