Re: CHAT: Art appreciation and conlang appreciation

>On Mon, 22 Nov 1999, David G. Durand wrote:
>
>>
>> I think that for conlanging, the level of naive appreciation is at the
>> level of phonology and the sound pattern of complete utterances. Long
>> before I had found the parsed version of Galadriel's song (or deduced any
>> of the grammar), I was in love with Namari=EB, and the flowing sounds of =
the
>> song.
>>
>
>Well, originally, the contention was that constructed languages
>couldn't be appreciated by the common man in the street, but that
>paintings and music could be. The case I tried to make was that for
>all those forms of art, a complete appreciation demands a lot of
>knowledge. A naive appreciation is equally possible with all those
>forms of art, as you've just shown.
Well, that goes to show that I can't always track what's really going on,
when I'm scanning email at the speed that the current CONLANG volume seems
to require. We seem to be agreeing here, pretty much.

Of course raging agreement is a common feature of email discussion.

>> If all this intellectual stuff were a requirement of appreciation, then a=
rt
>> of any kind would not exert the hold that it does on children.
>>
>
>Children, especially young children, almost all enjoy making up
>languages and toying with sounds, and made-up words. So you can
>approach all art intellectually, and get what the artist meant to
>convey (in those cases where the artist plays in intellectual 'game'),
>or naively and enjoy what you perceive - and both approaches are valid,
>of course!
I also think that in some ways a naive appreciatian has many things to
recommend it, including a certain purity of intention and freedom from ego
that's harder to maintain in the face of more "intellectual" appreciation.
I think that the "game" aspect of art is unappreciated, and that being a
game doesn't prevent something from being serious at the same time.

>So I still contend that there's not much difference between a
>constructed language and a painting in intrinsic accessability.
However, here I do feel a need to disagree, at least in degree. Naive
conlang appreciation may be possible, but I think that the nature of
language makes "naive conlang appreciation" much more superficial than
naive interpretation of a painting, because of the nature of the
"materials" involved. We are all much more skilled interpreters of visual
phenomena (at least for representational art) than of unknown linguistic
phenomena.

Much of the "meaning" in a painting is inherent in its visible surface. For
instance: what it represents (if it's representational art); its internal
symmetries; its proportions; its patterns of repetition and variation; the
visual relationships of its colors. Equivalent features exist for
constructed speech, especially in verse. I think it's very significant that
it's in Tolkien's verse that one gets the most intense impressions of
"elvishness," and where the attraction of the language is strongest to a
naive reader/listener. The structure of the verse helps to emphasize the
formal patterns that even a "naive" interpreter can detect.

But unlike most painting, language is about a specific relationship between
sound and meaning, and to appreciate that relationship one must know things
about the grammar of the language in question. A conlang is by its nature
fully abstract/

It may also be worth noting that esthetic appreciation of con-scripts is
more general than that of the languages. Based on my informal experience
many more people have learned something of Tengwar than have picked up even
pidgin Quenya, and this is not just due to the poor documentation of Quenya
grammar.

When confronted with an unknown con-script, one's sensitive ability to
analyze visual input is able to give much more immediate intuition into the
structure of a work than when presented with a simple recording. It also
ties into one's visual esthetic directly.

Of course, the nature of language learning makes it hard for many people to
even interpret conlangs by ear, because of the differences in phonology.
Monolingual "naive listeners" will probably miss some of the important
distinctions right off the bat.

   -- David
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