Re: Uglossia and Utopia

Sally Caves wrote:

>Jeffrey Schmidt, however, uses the term "uglossia," and I thought
>I would follow suit.  Utopia of course means "no place"; and a
>uglossia by extension would be a "no language"--meaning that
>it is fictional, made-up, existing in the mind of the creator.
>That was to be my connection.  Is there any way, though, that
>any of you artlangers look upon your creation as "utopic" in the
>way this word has come to be used--as an improvement upon society,
>or upon language and expression?
This may be a stretch, but...  My impression is that if you go back
to the earliest utopian literature, you find that typically the author
does not intend the utopia to be taken as a serious proposal for
establishing some future 'ideal' society, but rather as a satirical
commentary on the state of the present society that the author
is living in.  If this is the case, then a utopia is properly not
a (proposed) "improvement upon society", but rather a model for
testing/exploring/expressing certain ideas about society.  Perhaps
if you adopt this (non-idiomatic, literary) understanding of "utopia" as
a creative form of social criticism and analysis, then you could view
artlanging as "utopic".

One of the stated goals of Tokana is "to explore certain ideas and
aesthetic impulses related to the structure of language".  My artlang
projects, then, would seem to involve fiddling with linguistic ideas
in much the same way that utopias fiddle with existing social
structures and conventions.  Granted, Tokana is not intended as
a parody of natlangs in the way that Jonathan Swift's Lilliput was
a parody of English politics, but there's certainly a shared element
of playfulness.  Many of the conlang grammars that you find on the
web (complete with mock-serious scholarly asides and fake footnotes)
have a definite tongue-in-cheek quality to them which reminds me of
"Gulliver's Travels" and other works like that.

Just a thought...

>I would also like to start another Translation Relay Game if anybody
>is up for it, and if it hasn't been attempted too recently.  It would
>be a short poem; haven't quite decided on it yet.  Let me know privately
>if you would like to contribute again.  Or for the first time.
I'd like to be involved this time through, although it may be difficult,
since I left all my notes back in LA when I moved to Madison.  Perhaps
I could let you know if a Tokana translation would be doable, once I
see the original?

Matt.