Re: The Naturalist Manifesto revisited

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.  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.  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.  But, for
me, it wasn't enough.  I had to see what more was possible with language
beyond what natural languages do.


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.

--John Quijada

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