Hallo conlangers!

On Thursday 28 July 2011 18:17:45, And Rosta wrote:

> At the time this thread began I'd been wanting to write some further
> thoughts I'd had on the artlang/engelang distinction; it had been sinking
> lower and lower down my stack-based to-do list, but the happy
> resuscitation of this thread restores it to the top of the stack.
> 
> Jörg Rhiemeier, On 22/05/2011 17:41:
> > On Sun, 22 May 2011 14:54:45 +0100, R A Brown wrote:
> >> My understanding is that
> >> engelangs are "designed to specified *objective* criteria,
> >> and modeled to meet those criteria."  Whereas artlangs will
> >> have more *subjective* aims, e.g. aesthetically pleasing.
> > 
> > This is also my understanding.  An engelang is distinguished
> > by being designed according to a specified set of objective
> > criteria, while an artlang is based on more subjective notions.
> > This precisely is the difference between engineering and the
> > fine arts.
> 
> I of course agree with Ray and Joerg: artlangs differ from engelangs as art
> differs from engineering; and the "designed to specified objective
> criteria" criterion is one I proposed when first drawing the distinction.

Yes.
 
> But I think there's more to be said about the distinction. As much
> discussion over the years has shown, the Objective Design Criteria
> Criterion seems not sufficient to characterize on its own the art/enge
> distinction.

Certainly, the boundary is not sharply defined but blurry.
It is hard to objectively evaluate a design criterion as
"objective" or "subjective".  The design principles of
Brithenig are quite clear: apply the sound changes that
happened in Welsh since the time of the Roman conquest
of Britain to Vulgar Latin.  That can be considered an
"objective" criterion; yet, most of us would consider
Brithenig an artlang.  Generally, though, it is not easy
to measure linguistic data, as one often depends on the
choice of a corpus.  Language typologists have tried this
with such things as average morpheme length or indexes of
synthesis, agglutination, etc.  


>       I don't have any clearly articulated additional criteria to
> add, but more can be said about the characteristics of the two (Art &
> Enge) prototypes. To attempt to boil them down to theObjective Design
> Criteria Criterion (as I myself did), is to fail to fully apprehend the
> distinction.
> 
> 
> The Art approach:
> * sees language as a natural and/or organically evolved entity, in which
> parole is as important as langue
> * is akin to the impulse to make
> miniature models of the natural or cultural world -- to subcreate versions
> of reality
> * is comparable to the invention of physical geographies, or
> imaginary actually inhabited towns
> * creates a fictional entity

This at least captures the essence of fictional languages very
well, but not all artlangs are fictional languages (though most
are).  Some are just explorations of personal preferences in
language design, without any claim to the representation of an
imagined reality.
 
> The Enge approach
> * sees language as an abstract system, a machine, a set of rules, pure
> langue independent of any parole

I'm not sure whether this holds.  Some engelangs, at least,
are meant to be used in practice, so parole plays a role in
those engelangs, but one can say that langue takes priority
over parole even in such languages.

> * is akin to the impulse to invent
> solutions to problems, to devise functional improvements to existing
> design solutions

Yes.

> * is comparable to the design of hypothetical city plans
> and buildings (i.e. not descriptions of how imaginary cities and buildings
> happen to be in the world they exist in, but rather designs for Ideal
> solutions for the functions cities and buildings have)

Perhaps, yes; but it seems that the "artlang/engelang" dichotomy,
defined this way, goes parallel with the degree of "naturalism".
At least, it seems to show that a language can be both an artlang
and an engelang (as shown by Henrik Theiling's conlangs, most of
which I would consider artlangs of the personal/non-fictional kind
though they are definitely not naturalistic).

> * is comparable to
> the design of legal and electoral systems, of laws and voting methods,
> (again, Ideal solutions rather than simply the modelling of ones that
> happen to exist in an imaginary world, even if none of the rest of the
> imaginary world has been subcreated)

This sounds more like auxlanging ;)

> * creates a nonfictional entity

As I have said before, an artlang is not necessarily a
representation of a fictional entity, but it is certainly true
that such "typical" engelangs such as Lojban do not create a
fictional entity.  There is no imaginary country, at least not
one envisioned by the authors of Lojban, in which Lojban is
spoken ("Lojbanistan" is just a humorous term for the
international - real-world! - community of Lojban users;
whatever fictional societies which have adopted Lojban as
their language have been dreamt up by third parties is not
relevant to the classification of Lojban).

However, real-world usage is not always relevant to engelangs.
Some serve merely as theoretical models that are not meant
to be put into practice.  After all, we are *not* dealing with
auxlangs here (though Lojban, at least, has been suggested that
it be used as one).  But a theoretical model certainly is not
really what most of us understand to be a fictional entity,
either!
 
> These aren't neat criteria than one can easily apply to classify conlangs.

Indeed not.

> But they do characterize two very different approaches to invention, and
> two very different mindsets that conlangers have.

Certainly.  I am definitely primarily in the artlang camp as
you define it, though I sometimes digress into engelanging
(I haven't yet talked much about it, but I do have an engelang
on the back burner).

>       Just as linguistics more
> than almost any other discipline is at the crossroads of many other
> heterogeneous disciplines, so the invention of conlangs seems, more than
> the invention of almost any other sort of thing, to straddle these two
> very different kinds of invention.

Certainly, linguistics occupies a special place among the
humanities; it deals with what is perhaps the most essential
defining trait in what it means to be human, and has been called
"the hardest of the soft sciences".  Hence, conlanging is an art
of a very special nature, as it tinkers with just this most
essential defining trait of human beings.

--
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http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
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