Hallo conlangers!

On Tuesday 10 June 2014 14:36:06 R A Brown wrote:

> On 09/06/2014 04:27, Galen Buttitta wrote:
> > I always understood "a priori" and "a posteriori" in
> > conlanging to refer to whether or not the lang was
> 
> > descended from a proto-lang:
> ... and why not?  'prior' ~ 'post/posterior' - Hasn't Galen
> made a reasonable assumption just from the terms themselves?
> 
> The main reason IMO for the differences of opinion over what
> is and what is not a_priori and a_posteriori is that they
> are such poorly chosen terms?

No, they aren't.

> The difference of opinion has centered around their
> applicability to _artlangs_.  If we were to extend this
> terminology to art in general, then we would, I think, say
> that a Jackson Pollock painting is "a priori" but a
> Constable landscape is "a posteriori."
> 
> Then how would we describe Picasso's Guernica?
> 
> Why aren't paintings described as "a priori" or "a
> posteriori"?  Probably because the art-wold has got more sense.

That a term is not applicable to a partiucular field of art
doesn't mean that it is not applicable to any other field of
art, either.  The same way one could argue that the terms
"figurative" and "abstract" are useless in visual art because
they do not apply well to music!

Conlanging as well as experience with similar problems in
other fields of discourse taught me that words just mean
what people use them for, and decreeing away a common but
"wrong" usage doesn't work well.  In artlang circles, a
conlang that is made of whole cloth rather than derived
from one or more natlangs (or other conlangs), neither
"Esperanto-wise" nor by the diachronic method, is called
an "a priori conlang", even if this usage is not the same
as that introduced by Couturat and Leau into interlinguistics.

There are numerous examples of words meaning two different
things in two different fields of discourse, even closely
related ones.  Here are some examples:

A. Protolanguage:
1. (in historical linguistics) - the (attested or, more often,
    reconstructed) latest common ancestor of a language family.
   As any demonstrable language relationship is much shallower
   than the time when languages as we know them first emerged,
   such a protolanguage is emphatically *not* a protolanguage
   in the language origins studies sense, but a full-fledged
   language.
2. (in language origins studies) - a hypothetical communication
   system in prehistoric hominins that is intermediate between
   a non-human animal communication system and a human language,
   having some properties of language and lacking others.

B. Genetic relationship:
1. (in biology) - relationship by genes.
2. (in historical linguistics) - relationship by descent from
   a common ancestor language.  This has emphatically *nothing*
   to do with genes.

C. Progressive rock:
1. (in classic rock) - a subgenre of classic rock that emerged
   in the late 1960s when rock musicians strove to break out of
   the moulds of the blues and the popular song and sought to
   create more sophisticated, "serious" music, combining this
   approach with progressive social philosophy.  Exemplified by
   bands like Pink Floyd, Yes, King Crimson and Soft Machine.
2. (in alternative rock) - a subgenre of alternative rock that
   emerged in the early 1990s when rock musicians applied
   patterns of "progressively" densifying repetitive structures
   that had previously been used in electronic music to rock
   music.  Exemplified by bands like Tool or Isis.

D. Naturalistic language:
1. (in interlinguistics) - an IAL closely modelled on a few
   closely related natural languages, usually (but not always)
   Romance languages.  Examples: Occidental, IALA Interlingua.
2. (in artlanging) - an artlang that strives to emulate a
   fictional or hypothetical natural language.  Examples:
   Quenya, Brithenig.

A. and B. are the cause of endless misconceptions on language
evolution in the popular press; C. earned me the reputation of
being a pedant in fora where popular music was discussed as I
disputed the validity of the usage in alternative rock; D. has
been discussed here last year or so.

We are dealing with a similar case as D. with "a priori/
a posteriori", seems to me.

> =======================================================
> 
> On 08/06/2014 21:26, David Peterson wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> > Labeling Quenya as anything but a priori sounds not only
> > 
> >  odd, but insulting to me (as if Tolkien couldn’t do any
> >  better but jumbling up a mishmash of existing natlang
> > 
> > features to produce a conlang)
> 
> In a manner of speaking, he did, of course.  But it wasn't a
> jumbled mishmash; Tolkien was far too good a craftsman than
> that!  The mix is skilfully and subtly blended to which
> Tolkien added a good dose of original creativity to produce
> Quenya and its associated languages.

Yes.  Tolkien's languages are masterful and subtle blends of
features from various (mostly European) languages he was
familiar which and which he admired (or, in the case of Black
Speech, abhorred).
 
> [snip]
> 
> > between conlanging and linguistics, it would seem rather
> > 
> >  prescriptive to insist that the modern definitions of
> > 
> > the terms should be abandoned in favor of the original
> > definitions—
> 
> I'd like to see them dropt _entirely_ because they're
> confusing.  There are those like Galen who try to make sense
> of the terms and misunderstand them.  There are others, like
> me, who come from a tradition where they have been used to
> denote certain groups of auxlangs and who, consequently, are
> confused by their use to describe certain artlangs (or
> engelangs) in a somewhat different way.

I think both usages are now so firmly established in the
relevant fields of discourse that we cannot decree them away
any more.  All we can do is suggest better alternatives, as
you do below, and wait and see whether these succeed or not.

> [snip]
> 
> > Here’s the four types of conlang I refer to:
> > 
> > A priori vocabulary, a priori grammar: Teonaht
> > 
> > A posteriori vocabulary, a posteriori grammar: Brithenig
> > 
> > A posteriori vocabulary, a priori grammar: Toki Pona
> > (creoles are like this, too, in a sense)
> > 
> > A priori vocabulary, a posteriori grammar: English relex
> 
> Wouldn't something like 'original' and 'derived' be more
> meaningful and less confusing?  Thus:
> 
>           VOCABULARY  GRAMMAR
> TEONAHT    original   original
> BRITHENIG  derived    derived
> TOKI PONA  derived    original
> ENG. RELEX original   derived
> 
> One can argue how useful that is - but at least it seems to
> me a lot less confusing than the fairly meaningless "a
> priori" and "a posteriori" thing.

I agree with you that "original" and "derived" are better
terms than the philosophically laden "a priori" and
"a posteriori", and if you feel uneasy with the latter, just
do not use them!  Yet, there is no way denying that the usages
you decry are common practice in the relevant fields.

Also, what artlangers call "a posteriori" is a jumble of (at
least) two very different ways of coming up with a language
starting from pre-existing languages: (1) selecting vocabulary
from one or more source languages as in an "a posteriori" IAL
(2) applying diachronic changes to a starting language.
 
> Maybe it is helpful to have artlangs described thus.  But
> with engelangs I feel such table would not (always) be
> helpful.  For example, Tom Breton's AllNoun would be
> labeled: Vocabulary: derived; grammar: original.  But that's
> only because Tom wasn't interested in the vocabulary, only
> in the experiment of building a language with just one part
> of speech, i.e. noun.  He used English in his examples
> simply for convenience; *it's not intrinsic to the language*.
> 
> I guess, at least for engelangs, we ought to have another
> label besides 'original' and 'derived'; at the moment I
> can't think of anything better than 'not relevant.'
> Thus:
>            VOCABULARY    GRAMMAR
> AllNoun   not-relevant  original

Yes.

> Just some suggestions and thoughts - nothing prescriptive  :)

Of course not.  But a suggestion of new, less misleading and
less philosophically laden terminology is always welcome!

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