Hallo conlangers!

On Wed, 4 Apr 2012 11:40:20 -0600 Logan Kearsley wrote:

> On 2 April 2012 22:38, Eric Christopherson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> [...]
> > I don't mean to be harsh to the list, but I wouldn't expect Karen and her 
> > friends to go on and on about how unprofessional and shallow Conlang 
> > members' fiction writing is (especially of the amateurs among us). Nor 
> > would I expect Conlang members to be quite as critical of other members' 
> > beginning conlangs as they are of Mando'a. Constructively critical, yes, 
> > but not so dismissive.
> 
> I would expect them to do so if unprofessional and shallow fiction
> were actually published, though. Once something is printed in an
> actual book (and not via vanity press), there's an expectation that it
> conform to a higher level of quality.

Yes.  After the precedents of Klingon, Na'vi and Dothraki (I'll
set aside Quenya and Sindarin here, which are the products of
much more dedication than could be expected from a conlanger
hired to do a language for a media franchise), there is a certain
*state of the art* in professional conlang contracting which goes
well beyond going through a dictionary and assigning nice-sounding
strings of sounds to the entries.

> At the possible risk of offending someone who likes _Eragon_, it's
> like when people say "It's pretty good for something written by a
> 19-year-old". Well, yeah, but that's not the relevant metric. One can
> say "it's good for providing some flavor to a Star Wars novel with a
> linguistically naive audience", and that may be perfectly true and a
> perfectly valid goal and we may be pleased that it successfully
> fulfills its design goals. But that's irrelevant to the analysis of
> whether or not it's good *as a conlang*, or how annoyed one might get
> over the fact that *bad conlang* was published.

Ah, that much-maligned novel again.  I haven't read it yet, and
what I have been told about it doesn't give me an incentive to
read it - I guess I haven't missed much.  But as I haven't read
it, I am not entitled to judge it.  I think one should be somewhat
kind towards youth works, but if it just sucks rocks, it sucks
rocks, no matter how old the author is.  As I wrote above, there
is a certain state of the art, and newcomers are expected to
comply.

On Wed, 4 Apr 2012 14:38:57 -0400 Jim Henry wrote:

> On 4/2/12, Gary Shannon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > Yes, there are a great many things about this conlang that are naive,
> > and just plain wrong, but for the average reader it's probably
> > perfectly adequate for the job. As much as we would like to see every
> > conlang be a work of art, some are just minimally utilitarian. And
> > that's probably O.K.
> 
> I agree with your last couple of statements, without necessarily
> agreeing that they apply to this particular conlang (which I haven't
> looked into in depth).
> 
> "Minimally utilitarian", to me, means that the language is a sketch,
> just as fully developed as it needs to be to support the proper names
> and the few phrases or sentences used in the novel (or movie or comic
> or whatever), but with no additional details unnecessary to its use in
> the story.  It doesn't mean "relex of English" (bating the question of
> whether Karen Traviss' Mandalorian is a relex of English, which I
> won't go into).

Indeed.  I have long maintained the notion that even a brief
sketch that only gives a glimpse of a language can be masterfully
crafted, and I still maintain this notion now.  Even if you just
have a few dozen names and three or four lines of dialogue with
translations, you can show that you are not just doing a cipher of
English (or whatever language).  A good conlanger can create the
impression of a language with a lot of depth beneath it with a few
well-set strokes.

> A story-supporting sketchlang can have a simple phonology that uses a
> subset of English's phoneme inventory, to avoid using sounds that
> typical readers can't pronounce.

Fair.

>       It can be little more than the
> phonology, just enough to allow the author to create proper names that
> sound consistent, while most of the elements in those proper names are
> unexplained cranberrry morphs and few (or none) have a clear meaning.
> It can have only a handful of grammar rules, just enough to allow the
> author to write a few phrases and sentences, with all aspects of the
> grammar that aren't involved in those sentences left undecided and
> unexplained, and the lexicon not existing beyond the words used in
> those sentences.

Sure.  And these few rules that are given can meaningfully differ
from those of English (or whatever language).  With a few lines
of dialogue, you can already display the basic word order of the
language and some further aspects of its grammar; with just a few
words, you can already display the phonology (and that is of
course much more than a phoneme inventory).

> But the language's writing system shouldn't be a cipher of the English
> alphabet, and it's phonology shouldn't be identical to that of
> English,

Especially, the language should not copycat the baroque spelling
conventions of English!

>       and to the extent that the grammar and lexicon *are*
> developed and explained, we should expect it to make sense on its own
> terms.

Absolutely.

>       It shouldn't be a relex of English or any other natlang, or
> have elements that don't make sense (like, as some other posters
> mentioned, using tense only with species who care about it; would
> humans count as a species who care about tense?  Depends on what their
> native language is, doesn't it?).

You say it.

> I'd analogize it to two paintings.  In one, the foreground is detailed
> and realistically painted, while the background is hazy and vague, but
> otherwise in roughly the same realistic style as the foreground.  In
> another, the foreground is realistically detailed and well painted,
> while the background is similarly detailed, but badly painted.

Certainly, the first painting is better; or at least, most
people will think so.

> On the other hand, given how unrealistic the Star Wars universe is as
> a whole, maybe that's a bad analogy.  It's not as though the
> "foreground", the plot and characters and the foregrounded aspects of
> the worldbuilding, are such realistic art that the conlang in the
> background being unrealistic or bad art (if it is) is a shocking
> discontinunity.  It's not like, for instance, a hard sf novel where
> the physics of the foreground plot is realistic while the physics of
> background worldbuilding is horribly wrong.

Fine.  It has been said that Star Wars is just high fantasy with
science fiction props - it is about unlikely heroes, beautiful
princesses, brave knights, evil wizards and all that stuff.  It
works much like _The Lord of the Rings_; it is not at all
difficult to transpose the plot into a Middle-earth-like setting.
(Not that this means that a conlang made for a high fantasy
setting has more excuse for being unimaginative than one made
for a hard SF setting, though.)

> On the gripping hand, it looks like Karen Traviss' Mandalorian was
> based on a sketchy Mandalorian created by someone else -- kind of like
> Marc Okrand basing Klingon on the few lines of dialogue someone wrote
> for the first Star Trek movie, but with a larger, more constraining
> corpus.   She was probably pretty tightly constrained in what she
> could do with it and still be consistent with the earlier work, so we
> can't blame her for all the defects in the resulting product.

Yes.  Also, Hollywood is not known for granting artists working
for them as much time as they (claim to) need; deadlines are
often tight, and thus the work has to proceed quickly.

On Wed, 4 Apr 2012 11:43:00 -0700 Padraic Brown wrote:

> --- On Wed, 4/4/12, MorphemeAddict <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> > I suspect that the language would have been too weird or too
> > 'hard' if it had been any better. 
> 
> Possibly. But I think there are many other similar conlangs, i.e., conlangs
> that are part of movies (Na'vi, Dothraki, Klingon) that are bóth better and
> obviously not too weird or too hard to be learned by fans.

Yes.  People don't complain on how difficult those languages are.
As I have already observed, there are fans who care about the
languages who want to see good conlangs, and fans who don't care
about the languages who don't mind if there is much depth and
complexity therein.

> > It was nearly optimal for its purpose.
> 
> I don't necessarily think it is "optimal" or even "nearly optimal", but 
> neither do I think twas horrible trash. I will say it was clearly good 
> enough for Lucasfilm to buy it, and that means it is quite good enough for 
> the purpose it was designed for. That bit about getting one's knickers in 
> a twist is probably the best part of the whole page, and I think that's 
> where I'll leave it, before any formal censure can take place! ;)

Fair.  Karen Traviss's language is ugly hackwork, by the 
standards of our community, that is.  But apparently it was
good enough for Lucasfilm to buy it, as you say.  Whether it
is good enough for the *fans*, it's another matter.  The major
part of the fan community will swallow it, I am sure, but the
language geeks among the fans surely find exception with it.

Whether Mrs. Traviss *could* have made a better conlang, given
factors such as pre-existing material that had to be used and
tight deadlines, I cannot say.

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