Re: The Naturalist Manifesto revisited

Hallo!

On Sat, 13 Mar 2004 12:46:27 -0500,
John Quijada <jq_ithkuil@...> wrote:

> Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
>
> >There are people here on the list (as well as elsewhere) who are
> >interested in languages that are markedly different from anything ever
> >spoken anywhere.  The philosophical language movement, for example,
> >may have been past its climax long ago, but it hasn't died out yet.
> >There are people who design engelangs and don't care a shoot about
> >naturalist conlangs.  That's their right.  Just because I prefer
> >naturalist artlangs I wouldn't conclude that non-naturalist conlangs
> >were bad art.  They are simply not the same style of art.
> >
>
> Well put.  And there are those of us "engelangers" who DO CARE about
> naturalist conlangs.  It's just not where we're at in our conlanging art at
> this point in our career.
Of course.  It is one thing to appreciate conlangs of a particular
school, and it is another thing to craft such conlangs oneself.
Likewise, I prefer making naturalist conlangs, but that doesn't mean
that I have no interest in engelangs and wouldn't appreciate them.
I just feel little desire to *make* them.

>       How do you compare, say, Michelangelo or a
> Hudson Valley School master like Bierstadt with artists like Dali or
> Picasso?  The latter painters appreciated traditional painting as well as
> the next artist, but their own desire was to push the limits of painting to
> see what was possible.
Yes.

>       I myself created several natlangs back in the 70s
> and early 80s (I particularly recall becoming obsessed upon studying
> Swedish and immediately spent months designing a Swedish-influenced
> natlang).  I'm particularly fond of those conlangs that represent lost sub-
> branches or offshoots of existing language families and groups.
So am I.  One of my favourite other people's conlangs is Andrew
Smith's Brithenig; my Germanech is a similar project, representing the
kind of Romance that might have evolved in Germany if that country had
been Romanized; Albic is a sister language to Indo-European: not
really IE, but related.

>       But, for
> me, it wasn't enough.  I had to see what more was possible with language
> beyond what natural languages do.
This is a perfectly legitimate approach, and it is not my business to
reject it just because I do things differently.

> A philosophical language presented as the
> >language of a fictional ethnic group that lives God-knows-where would
> >be a failure, because natural languages aren't like that.
>
> As for presenting a philosophical language as the language of a fictional
> group, I personally have always been disappointed that the various versions
> of "Vulcan" (the Star Trek culture) that have been offered up were not
> philosophical languages or loglangs.  Given the nature of Serak's logical
> revolution which completely transformed Vulcan society (according to Star
> Trek "history"), you'd think they'd include a *conscious* redesign of their
> language to match their new ultra-logical philosophy and worldview.  Just a
> thought.
I should have added "unless the group has adopted an engineered
language at some point of their history, for whichever reason".
Of course it is conceivable that a certain society speaks, say,
a loglang, if they have decided to adopt one.  The Vulcans of
_Star Trek_ are indeed a prime candidate for that.  Likewise,
a future transhumanist sect might adopt a speedtalk or loglang
scheme.  In a near-future history I am currently working on,
there is a transhumanist sect that has adopted Lojban as their
official language, though in practise they use Lojban and English
side by side.

Greetings,

Jörg.