Hallo conlangers!

On Wednesday 04 January 2012 19:31:19 Padraic Brown wrote:

> --- On Tue, 1/3/12, Puey McCleary <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >       I hope everyone is having a good new
> > year so far.
> > 
> >                
> > Last year, in his excellent “smiley” award for Okuna,
> > David Peterson wrote:
> > 
> >                
> > “As conlanging itself is still a young art, I don't think
> > we've seen a masterpiece yet. Okuna approaches that
> > threshold, though.”
> 
> I don't agree with that at all. Conlanging is nòt a "young art" at all. It
> is very old indeed. "Little known", perhaps, but not exactly a spring
> chicken!

Indeed.  Conlanging has existed for centuries, with Lingua Ignota,
Balaibalan, Utopian and Enochian, to mention just a few.  The idea
of the artificial "universal language" appeared in the 17th century
with the polygraphies and philosophical languages.  The languages
that would eventually become Quenya and Sindarin were started almost
a century ago.

Conlanging only *appears* to be a young art as it was the Internet
which allowed thousands of conlangers to come out of their closets
and introduce their creations to a global fan audience.
 
> > I was wondering whether others thought that there is not
> > yet a conlang masterpiece.  I myself could probably be
> > argued either way.
> 
> Well, one reason why we don't have masterpieces in conlanging is because
> we don't have the external critical apparatus required for something to
> be declared a "masterpiece". Whenever someone here says "hey take a look
> at my language", the response is generally "wow, that's cool!" No one has
> yet stepped forward to *criticse*. No one has yet stepped forward to say
> "this language is a masterpiece because of X, Y and Z qualities".

Indeed, the art of conlanging lacks a well-established body of
criticism.  That is only beginning to form.  There are, of course,
scholarly treatments of the international auxiliary language
movement, and of some "major" artlangs such as those of Tolkien
or Klingon.  But most commentary on conlangs so far is of the
"Hey cool!" or "That sucks!" quality.  Even rock'n'roll criticism
is more developed than that.

> We haven't got the descriptive language, the metalanguage, to talk about
> the art itself. We can describe grammatical features and phonemes ad
> nauseam, but to what school does a conlang belong? What qualities define
> that school? In what ways is it different from other conlangs? What
> techniques did the artist use and how did he use them to make an effect?
> We can talk about tone colors and melodic themes and modalsim and
> orchestration in music and we can talk about styles and interpretation
> of black dots on white paper -- but what is the conlanging analogue?

An excellent observation.  So far, most "reviews" of conlangs are
rather linguistic descriptions of the languages.  A true critical
metalanguage has not yet evolved much.  The beginnings are already
showing, with the recognition of various "types" or "schools" of
conlangs such as the "naturalist" school.  I remember such a
discussion from March 2002, starting with this post by Jesse Bangs:

http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0203B&L=CONLANG&P=R13933

The development of conlang critique has not made much progress
since then, it seems to me.  The critical metalanguage of our art
is pretty much undeveloped beyond such hazy notions as "original"
or "naturalistic".

> >                 How
> > exactly would one define a conlang masterpiece?  In
> > what ways must a conlang fulfill its stated or implied
> > purpose in order to
> > be considered a masterpiece?  For instance, if one
> > were to argue that
> > Esperanto or Quenya were masterpieces, they would have
> > different criteria.
> 
> There's the $64000 question. By what criteria, and by whose decision?
> Clearly, some way of categorising conlangs into schools or some other term
> will be required. We do that to a certain extent with terms like "artlang"
> and "Romlang" and so forth. The criteria for each group will be necessarily
> different from those of the other groups.

Yes.  There is no way of defining what a "good" conlang is without
taking its design goals (express or implied by the "purpose" of
the language) into account.  A conlang that represents an extinct
language of prehistoric Europe has to be gauged against different
criteria than one that represents the language of non-humanoid
alien intelligent beings, and a logical language or a machine
translation interlingua is yet a completely different kettle of
fish.
 
> > Perhaps there are several conlang masterpieces out there,
> > but there has not yet been written a grammar and lexicon
> > which themselves
> > are a work of art.  In that case, it’s not so much
> > the language that’s the
> > deficiency but one’s craft in writing (or something
> > else).
> > 
> >                 Or
> > perhaps the conlang masterpieces that already exist have
> > not yet been used to their full potential.  These
> > conlangs have not yet
> > been used both for translation and for the composition of
> > original,
> > substantial text.  (How much did Zamenhof actually
> > translate into Esperanto?
> > Hamlet, some of the Hebrew Bible, perhaps some
> > fables.  Would Zamenhof’s
> > work be a good model on what one must produce for the sake
> > of completeness?)
> 
> I agree that a conlang is at its best when it is used to compose its own
> literature. I don't see much point in making a whole language just to
> translate Hamlet. The question of a conlang being one side of the coin
> with its conculture should be addressed. (Unless the language is designed
> to used within a primary world culture.)

Right.  A good fictional language should have a body of *original*
literature.  Translating _Hamlet_ may be a good way of demonstrating
the completeness and expressive power of a conlang, but a work of
original literature does the same, and more than that, highlights
the imagined culture associated with the language, what a translation
of a work like _Hamlet_ or _Alice in Wonderland_ does not.  (Of
course, the Klingon _Hamlet_ translation was born from a line of
dialogue in _Star Trek_ where a Klingon character says about _Hamlet_
that it was "best in the original Klingon".)

And even in the auxlang scene, it is recognized that having a body
of original literature is one of the best ways of raising popular
interest in the relevant language.

As long as we continue just bandying about grammar sketches, we
won't really get out of our hobbit hole.  *All* popular artlangs
became popular because they were featured in popular novels, films
or TV series.  Grammar sketches only raise the interest of language
geeks, which most of us are, but most other people aren't.
 
> > Perhaps one reason (one may argue) that we have not yet
> > produced a masterpiece is because our art is so young that
> > we don’t even
> > have sufficient vocabulary to describe it.  Perhaps
> > when photography was
> > first developed, one used terms from painting before a new
> > vocabulary was
> > made.  Even though we may call a film actor and a
> > stage actor an “actor,”
> > I’m sure there are different terms for these
> > disciplines.  The creation of
> > language is of course a linguistic process, but for some
> > people it is also
> > related to fiction, and as such, it cannot quite be
> > described using either
> > the tools of pure linguistics, nor the tools of pure
> > literature.
> 
> The language itself can I think be well described using pure linguistics.

Yes, and that is indeed already done.  But that is linguistic
description and not artistic critique.

> But I think you are touching on an important aspect, namely that of the
> fictional aspect of the art: world building and conculturing.

Precisely that, for fictional languages.  Of course, there are
plenty conlangs which have no fictional worlds or cultures
attached, such that this point does not apply to them.  These
need another mode of critique which dwells on the creativity
embodied in the fabric of the language itself.
 
> > Just some thoughts.
> 
> Some further thoughts on the question.
> 
> Also consider this: I hold that conlanging is an artistic pursuit;

Surely it is.

>       but I
> don't believe that the conlang in and of itself is the objet d' art. The
> conlang itself is simply the medium which the conlanger has created *in
> which* the artist will now write a masterpiece of language art.

Hmm.  I think a conlang itself *can* be an objet d'art, but one
that only few people will appreciate, and most of the better
artlangs excel by playing a role in a larger artistic edifice
such as a fantasy novel, and playing that role well.  If Tolkien
had not written _The Lord of the Rings_ but instead _A Historical
Grammar of the Eldarin Languages_, his conlangs would be better
described, but certainly almost entirely forgotten.

The audience of conlangs as stand-alone works of art is just
vanishingly small, perhaps a few thousand people worldwide.

> 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.
>  
> This is why I, at least, hold that conlanging is one tool or one activity
> within a larger armamentarium. What is a language if not a means of
> communication between intelligent beings?

Nothing - just a set of idle forms and rules.  Languages are there
to be *spoken*.

>       Thus the natural pairing of
> creating languages with creating cultures that use the languages.

Most conlangs, at least, are of that sort.  Some are linguistic
experiments with no invented cultures attached, but even Esperanto
and Lojban have their cultures.

>       So,
> making the language is only part of the story, and therefore part of the
> masterpiece. It is when we combine a language with its proper culture and
> in its proper place (a country, a world, and entirely different set of
> dimensions) that, at least in my opinion, we can find our masterpieces.
> 
> From my perspective, the masterpiece is not "Sindarin" nor even is it "A
> Elbereth", but rather the masterpiece is the whole legendarium -- all the
> component parts that fit together in a single, artistic whole. Like an
> opera or a ballet where you have music, song, dance, choreography,
> costume design, set design and all that goes into presenting the whole
> masterpiece. Seeing the grammar of a conlang is sort of like looking at
> a Magic Flute reduction for piano.

Indeed, Tolkien's legendarium is a gesamtkunstwerk, and that is what
makes it stand out.  There aren't just grammar sketches and word
lists (in fact, not much of that sort has come to light so far):
there is a massive novel of about 1,000 pages, a smaller (and more
juvenile) novel, a body of mythology, calendars, genealogies,
stories, scholarly treatises of various matters, drawings, maps,
and other stuff.  A whole imagined world!  The languages are just
one facet of it, and if all we have were the languages, they'd be
remembered merely as an eccentricity of an Oxford don, if at all.

--
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