--- On Wed, 1/4/12, David Peterson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On Jan 4, 2012, at 10:31 AM, Padraic Brown wrote:
> 
> > 
> > What *really* distinguishes Kerno from English? Except
> for one being a
> > created language and the other being a natural
> language, I hold that there
> > are no substantive differences. If I've done my job
> well in crafting the
> > language, Kerno will be able to express any thought or
> emotion or describe
> > any thing or discuss any idea that is humanly
> conceivable. It won't do it
> > in the same exact way English does (but then, what's
> the sense in actually
> > reinventing English itself?); it will do all that in
> its own way. But I 
> > think the artistic part of it comes in what I've
> written *with* the 
> > language, not the language itself.
> 
> Then why do it? It'd be a lot easier to produce the same
> work in English. 

You bet! It would be a damn sight easier to not have to bother with another
language! But I really doubt I would have written these stories without
the other language; and even if I did, they would have been foundationless.

Because they are not English stories conceived by American (or some other
Anglophone) people and thus can't be *written in* English. It is idiomatic 
and fits the (fictional) time and place of its composition. It assumed a
particular culture, a particular history and a particular way of thinking
that is not the same as my native one. It can be translated, but as with 
any translation, something is lost from the original. It's like with any 
literature, you can translate meaning word for word, but you lose the 
secondary meaning and you lose the supratextual stuff (rhythm, tonal 
effects) and you lose the idioms and cultural references. You can 
translate the supratextual stuff, but you probably won't end up with 
anything like the original meaning. A language lives within its culture, 
whether real or fictional, and it is through that language that the 
culture is most perfectly expressed.

So, in order to create a particular work of language art, I devised the
language and culture that is most perfect for expressing it. Kinda 
backwards maybe. A lot of conlangers seem to start with a couple nouns and
verbs and then try to sort some grammatical stuff as they go. Maybe as
they go along they might try a sentence or two. Nothing at all wrong with 
that. I start out with some artifact from the other world, in this case, a 
story, and allow the language to settle around and breath a life into the 
story.

I'm not saying I do it perfectly, or even that I've done a passable job!
I'm not saying it's a masterpiece (and probably would disagree with anyone
who said it is). I'm just saying that this is how I view conlanging and
its place in a greater artistic whole.

> David Peterson

Padraic