Re: Psycho Conlanging Closet Hypnotized --- Film at 11!
| From: | Diana Slattery <slattd@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Sunday, February 14, 1999, 2:06 |
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Sally Caves wrote:
> > It would be a super project someday to burn a CD with
> > > conlangers's web pages, audio files, special doo-dahs of all kind. (open mouth,
> > > insert foot).
>
> Actually, that WOULD be a great idea, Diana... it would be the only way to convey some
>
> of these projects visually and aurally. I think a great deal is lost if we're not
> HEARING
> these languages we're making up, and not seeing the scripts they're written in.
> Webpages
> help, but I do know that when it's written out on paper, I have a hard time accessing
> ANY foreign
> language, and I'm acutely aware a lot of the time that Teonaht just looks like a bunch
> of
> gibberish--or worse, sort of enters the common stream of "just-another-conlang" when
> it's
> typed out on screen.
The audio file of you reading in Teonaht is invaluable in understanding what this is all
about, the beauty of the sounds. What a dream it would be to have a "jukebox" of each
conlanger speaking in his/her created language. Speaking in scattered tongues. Doing
something multimedia along this line makes my mouth water.
> One of the things I wonder about as I write this essay is to
> what extent
> all this exposure to one another threatens to take away the uniqueness of what we're
> doing.
Oh, what a deep matter you open here. The paradox of secret/exposure/hiding/outing
The desire to have something all one's own, unique vs. the longing to communicate if not
in one's language at least, second best?, about one's language.
>
> When you read "A Secret Vice," you realize how doing something like this in isolation,
> as
> Tolkien did, lends a kind of unparalleled mystery to the endeavor, that will be
> rendered
> commonplace by too much media attention... how-to webpages, and so forth. On the one
> hand, I'm glad for Conlang... my understanding of how Teonaht works and can work has
> been vastly deepened by my contact with the linguistic gurus on the list. On the
> other, I
> wonder what happens when everybody knows about it and starts doing it.
My own gut sense is that "conlanging" is an emergent form, a cultural "metaform" (whatever
that means, but you get my intent of a step back from a cultural form per se--a cultural
form about a cultural form)--perhaps call it an idea springing up spontaneously all over
the place that then the generating nodes get to connect because of another major major
cultural emergent form: the WWW. So suddenly the links are made and the sparks fly. And
the emergent has a tendency to appear under the sign of the monstrous: the secret vice,
the maligned art, the frankensteinish manufacture, the "unnatural" language, containing,
strangely, some of the same wavelength of excitement as the engineering of our genes--oh,
I too can dream a body, can dream a world, can build a language. All the
hubris/delight/playfulness/ of world-building, of what children learn they should not do
if they expect to be card-carrying grownups.
> Shameful as it
>
> is to admit this, but I took great pride as an adolescent and a young adult in this
> "secret"
> hobby of mine, absolutely sure that maybe only five or six other people in the nation
> were
> doing it (harumph... THAT was a misconception, wasn't it?). I actually enjoyed
> thinking
> I was a little crazy. I love the description in "A Secret Vice" where Tolkien
> overhears a
> fellow soldier whisper to himself in the messhall: "I've got it: I shall indicate
> the accusative
> with a prefix!" But that was all he could get out of him. After the closet conlanger
> discovered
> that he had revealed himself, he clammed up.
>
> So I wonder then: is the listserv changing a fundamental aspect of conlanging by
> allowing us
> to air our projects in a public forum? What was once secret and unique now becomes
> display and even agon?
No question about it...but the genie is out of the bottle (or closet) now, hmmm???? Get
that book out, Sally.
Diana