There are 6 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: New Year's Thoughts
From: Rich Harrison
1.2. Re: New Year's Thoughts
From: MorphemeAddict
1.3. Re: New Year's Thoughts
From: MorphemeAddict
1.4. Re: New Year's Thoughts
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
1.5. Re: New Year's Thoughts
From: Herman Miller
2a. Tonogenesis
From: neo gu
Messages
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1.1. Re: New Year's Thoughts
Posted by: "Rich Harrison" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 6, 2012 9:09 am ((PST))
I agree that conlangers can communicate more than ever before, seeing what's
been done previously, urging each other to go this way or that way, offering
flames or encouragement for newbies. A mixed blessing. But yes, *public*
artlanging and engelanging are a new thing, a young activity.
I don't think we've found the best art/craft analogy for conlanging yet.
Cinema or painting might be a better analogy than car design. I lean towards
painting as an analogy because the best paintings are always done by single
individuals. As far as I can recall, group efforts haven't yet produced any
conlangs that impressed me.
Tolkiens' langs, like the Mona Lisa -- one has heard so many people refer to
these as masterpieces that it is difficult to decide for oneself whether
they are or not. Perhaps something being labelled a masterpiece is a social
phenomenon, propped up by such weak supports as popularity and expert opinions.
Messages in this topic (44)
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1.2. Re: New Year's Thoughts
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 6, 2012 2:41 pm ((PST))
Writing plays is similar. The text of the play may be good or not, but the
performance of the same play is always different. And while I can enjoy a
good performance, I don't read plays.
stevo
On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 12:08 PM, Rich Harrison <[email protected]> wrote:
> I agree that conlangers can communicate more than ever before, seeing
> what's
> been done previously, urging each other to go this way or that way,
> offering
> flames or encouragement for newbies. A mixed blessing. But yes, *public*
> artlanging and engelanging are a new thing, a young activity.
>
> I don't think we've found the best art/craft analogy for conlanging yet.
>
> Cinema or painting might be a better analogy than car design. I lean
> towards
> painting as an analogy because the best paintings are always done by single
> individuals. As far as I can recall, group efforts haven't yet produced any
> conlangs that impressed me.
>
> Tolkiens' langs, like the Mona Lisa -- one has heard so many people refer
> to
> these as masterpieces that it is difficult to decide for oneself whether
> they are or not. Perhaps something being labelled a masterpiece is a social
> phenomenon, propped up by such weak supports as popularity and expert
> opinions.
>
Messages in this topic (44)
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1.3. Re: New Year's Thoughts
Posted by: "MorphemeAddict" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 6, 2012 2:41 pm ((PST))
Composing music is like writing plays, only more so.
stevo
On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 5:40 PM, MorphemeAddict <[email protected]> wrote:
> Writing plays is similar. The text of the play may be good or not, but the
> performance of the same play is always different. And while I can enjoy a
> good performance, I don't read plays.
>
> stevo
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 12:08 PM, Rich Harrison <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I agree that conlangers can communicate more than ever before, seeing
>> what's
>> been done previously, urging each other to go this way or that way,
>> offering
>> flames or encouragement for newbies. A mixed blessing. But yes, *public*
>> artlanging and engelanging are a new thing, a young activity.
>>
>> I don't think we've found the best art/craft analogy for conlanging yet.
>>
>> Cinema or painting might be a better analogy than car design. I lean
>> towards
>> painting as an analogy because the best paintings are always done by
>> single
>> individuals. As far as I can recall, group efforts haven't yet produced
>> any
>> conlangs that impressed me.
>>
>> Tolkiens' langs, like the Mona Lisa -- one has heard so many people refer
>> to
>> these as masterpieces that it is difficult to decide for oneself whether
>> they are or not. Perhaps something being labelled a masterpiece is a
>> social
>> phenomenon, propped up by such weak supports as popularity and expert
>> opinions.
>>
>
>
Messages in this topic (44)
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1.4. Re: New Year's Thoughts
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 6, 2012 3:24 pm ((PST))
Hallo conlangers!
On Friday 06 January 2012 00:51:16 David Peterson wrote:
> Responding to two similar comments:
>
> On Jan 5, 2012, at 8:31 AM, Rich Harrison wrote:
> > David Peterson:
> >> Conlanging as art is extremely young (less than 100 years).
> >
> > I don't agree, although (lacking a time machine) I can't prove that my
> > view is correct. I think a handful of teenagers and retired persons have
> > sketched out new langauges since humans were dropped off on this planet.
> > There was simply no way to preserve or publish most of them.
Certainly. All those early conlangs are lost in time like tears
in the rain because nobody other than their inventors cared
about them.
> > When the ideas of philosophical and auxiliary languages came into vogue,
> > suddenly it was possible to preserve your conlang and transmit it to
> > future generations by framing, casting, and spinning it as a project of
> > that type. Deep down inside you were merely giving energy to the
> > langauge play instinct, like any artlanger, but by claiming it was part
> > of the quest for a philo/aux lang you could justify publishing it in a
> > book and donating it to libraries.
This is perhaps what actually drove at least some of the many
auxlangers and designers of philosophical languages, especially
those with the weirder, more irrational schemes. I think that
Zamenhof was really motivated by a desire to bridge the trenches
that separated language communities, though, and some others, too.
But some auxlangs indeed look as if the alleged purpose of
facilitating international communication was just a contrived
raison d'être for a design that really existed merely because the
designer wanted to make it.
> [Comparison with automobile design]
> Can you even imagine some guy in today's world debuting a
> "brand new" method of personal transportation called the R.P.T.S. (Rapid
> Personal Transit Systemor "rap", for short), which is a vehicle with a
> metal frame and four wheels that runs on an engine powered by gasoline,
> and trying to patent it, because he thinks it's a brand new invention?
>
> And yet, as late as...what, 2000? That was still happening with conlanging
> (and it may happen yet, though the chances of it grow smaller and smaller
> with each passing day).
Yes, there are still many people who "reinvent the wheel" because
they simply haven't heard before of others who had done the same
before them. When I started my first conlangs, I knew that
Esperanto existed (but had no idea what it was like), and had seen
the Quenya and Sindarin songs in _The Lord of the Rings_ (but knew
nothing about their grammar), so I knew that I wasn't the first
conlanger; but I knew so little about other people's conlangs that
I could only base my conlangs on those languages I knew back then:
German, English and Latin. No wonder that my first conlangs were
essentially Euroclones. Only about 12 years ago I discovered
Langmaker and the CONLANG list, and that opened up a new, wider
perspective. I saw many conlangs that were beautifully different
from the languages that were familiar to me, and continued to
explore the natlangs that inspired them, and found lots of ideas
I could work into my own conlangs that I had not been aware of
during all the years that had elapsed before.
> And even those who've heard of some of the famous
> ones are still "inventing" the concept of a language with free word order,
> or with regular conjugations that are "simpler than English", or without
> irregular plurals (except for words like "fish" and "sheep" which, of
> course, are the same in the singular and the plural). And while there's
> nothing wrong with those concepts in a conlang (ANADEWor maybe ANADEMR
> [another natlang already does it even more regularly]?), one should know
> that one's doing them, and that they're not the fore-ordained outcomes of
> creating a language.
Yes, all of us must have seen dozens of those beasts. How boring
- but many of them are meant as auxlangs, and those have a valid
reason for being like that.
> While there are probably at least 100 conlangs for every one we know about,
> since no one knows about them, no one benefitted by them; no one learned
> from them. Probably the earliest communities we had were the auxlang
> communities in the late 19th century, and while they learned from each
> other, what they learned was how to create a better auxlanghow to create
> a more useful tool for communication. That was the goal, and that was the
> direction their energies took them in.
Yep. The craft of auxlanging did not advance much until the
advent of Volapük because all those early auxlangs were quickly
forgotten, and hardly any auxlanger knew any of their precedents.
Then came Volapük, which made the idea of an artificial IAL
popular, but on the other hand had so many shortcomings that many
people desired a better solution. For most of them, Esperanto
was that solution; but from then on, new auxlangers knew at least
one previous auxlang and could improve on it rather than starting
over from scratch.
> Not until the 20th century was
> anyone concerned with, say, authenticity (how can I make this language
> look more like a natural language?), phonoaesthetic beauty (completely
> subjective, but still something some of us strive of), cultural reality
> (I've got a society of tentacled aliens. How would their language reflect
> that?), and (one that I think is too often ignored) fun (after all,
> language is fun! That's why most of us do this!).
Right. Those few that designed fictional languages (I mean,
actual languages rather than just fanciful names in a story
set in a fictional country) had nothing to draw upon (except,
of course, the natlangs they had learned in their life).
Before the 20th century, also, most imaginary countries were
meant to portray (or satirize) ideal societies, and their
imaginary languages were thus more akin to philosophical
languages than natlangs. The idea of a *naturalistic*
fictional language was first visible to the public in
Tolkien's works.
> And it wasn't until the 1990s that we found a way to present our work to
> each other. While there may have been a conlanger or two that ran into
> each other prior, there were no communities.
Precisely. Before the 1990s, when the Web started, the only
way to publish an artlang was to write a fantasy or science
fiction novel featuring the artlang and find a publisher who
would print it *with the appendix that describes the language
in more depth*, which was not easy. (Or trying to "sell" it
as an auxlang, which usually did not work well either.)
> And while a writer in the
> 17th century may have written without knowing or conversing with other
> writers, they didn't do so without reading other books.
Yes.
> With conlanging,
> we had neither stable communities, nor other works to look at, aside from
> the auxlangs, Tolkien's stuff, and Klingonand most of that wasn't
> presented in a way that would be useful to a conlanger.
Right. Grammars and learning materials were available only
for Esperanto and some other major auxlangs; of Quenya and
Sindarin, there were only the text samples in _The Lord of the
Rings_ and the appendixes of the same, but no grammars nor
learning materials.
> While people may
> have been creating languages for a thousand or more years, *this* is
> newand, crucially, it's something that's not new to literature, pottery,
> rug weaving, etc. That's why I still contend that conlanging, as we do it
> today, is *extremely* young.
So it is. Artlanging as it is today - an art with a networked
community of hundreds of practicioners who could draw on a
published body of previous artlangs - is a very young art,
existing only since about 1990. (It tells a lot that the most
commonly used term for this art today is derived from the name
of this very mailing list!) Only the advent of the Internet-
based community of conlangers made it possible that younger
artlangers could stand on the shoulders of previous artlangers
and advance the art further, rather than starting over from
zero.
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Êm, a Êm atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Êmel." - SiM 1:1
Messages in this topic (44)
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1.5. Re: New Year's Thoughts
Posted by: "Herman Miller" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 6, 2012 7:52 pm ((PST))
On 1/6/2012 6:24 PM, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Precisely. Before the 1990s, when the Web started, the only
> way to publish an artlang was to write a fantasy or science
> fiction novel featuring the artlang and find a publisher who
> would print it *with the appendix that describes the language
> in more depth*, which was not easy. (Or trying to "sell" it
> as an auxlang, which usually did not work well either.)
Or a role-playing game (M.A.R. Barker's "Empire of the Petal Throne",
featuring the Tsolyáni language).
Messages in this topic (44)
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2a. Tonogenesis
Posted by: "neo gu" [email protected]
Date: Fri Jan 6, 2012 6:50 pm ((PST))
I've been having trouble with the internal history of the latest, which is
supposed to have tones (polysyllabic with H-L), and came across this:
http://www.csuchico.edu/~gt18/Papers/Vietnamese_tonogenesis.pdf
The paper modifies the traditional approach, using basic articulation
and acoustics. Unfortunately, it doesn't make _my_ problem any easier,
but some may find it interesting.
Messages in this topic (25)
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