Re: Psycho Conlanging Closet Hypnotized --- Film at 11!

Terry Donnelly wrote:

> Diana Slattery wrote:
>
> > 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.
Exactly, Diana... and my point as well... I wonder if the internet will "dignify" the pursuit in
theeyes of critics, because up until now the "learned" arguments I've read about inventing
languages
is that, at the bottom line, they're infantile or fruitless, bordering on the pathological.
Helene
Smith, etc., the protagonist in Hannah Green's _I Never Promised You a Rose Garden_,
Tolkien notwithstanding.  But then there are others who say that the Internet, instead of
opening the parts of the world up to each other just encourages some of us in our obsessions!
Not that I believe that, or rather believe that that's a bad thing; but there's a lot of talk
out there.

I like what Terry says below, too.
Sally

> I've thought a lot about whether new paradigms are truly arising in
> human culture,
> as some people have posited.  I can recall several science fiction
> novels in
> which people were presumed to have evolved to something more than our
> current
> state, and new ideas, art forms, even new emotions were an expression of
> this.
> I sometimes think that conlanging is one such emerging artform, and that
> the
> pleasure we take in devising conlangs is one of those new emotions.
> Maybe
> we're on the cutting edge of evolution here.  It wouldn't seem odd to me
> at all
> that such a development was facilitated by the invention of the
> Internet, which
> is likely a change agent for this new paradigm in a lot of ways.
>
> -- Terry
>
> http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Corridor/2711