Hallo conlangers!

On 17.03.2016 01:16, David Peterson wrote:

>> On Mar 16, 2016, at 1:21 PM, Ron Hale-Evans <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> When is "just because I like it" not a valid reason for conlang features?
> At the precise moment when you care what someone else thinks about the conlang.

Yep.

> If it’s a true personal language and you don’t care what anyone else thinks, then it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks about it but you. If you care what others think, that’s where things become complicated, and where you have to have a clearly defined goal for your language. If your goal is “whatever I want”, then you have to be prepared for people to say, “Okay. I think this is terrible and I hate it” without giving any justification whatsoever.

I have seen many conlangs which IMHO were just terrible. But I tend not 
to comment on such languages, instead of saying "This sucks". I feel 
that one should not review something which one cannot do justice. In 
fact, I can appreciate if someone finds pleasure in a project one could 
consider silly. If he finds fun and self-confirmation in it, it is fine.

For instance, a member of the ZBB once presented a "conlang" that was 
little else than a relex of English, with the "twist" that it used only 
letters which have neither ascenders nor descenders in lower case, i.e. 
only _acemnorsuvwxz_ and not _bdfghijklpqty_. What a stupid idea, one 
may think, from the standpoint of naturalism - but that just *doesn't 
matter*. It may not fit this or that paradigm of conlanging, but in 
itself, it is an idea as justifiable as many others.

> If your goal is naturalism, there’s no hard cutoff point where you say, for example, 294 features is natural; 295 features is an abomination and could never exist in the real world. You have to look at the system as a whole and figure out how it was derived to see how likely it is for any given feature or set of features to have evolved naturally.

Certainly so - there is no hard-and-fast boundary between "naturalistic" 
and "non-naturalistic". This is the reason why a naturalistic conlanger 
should read as many natlang descriptions as he can - to get a feeling of 
what kind of things go in a naturalistic artlang and what not.

> If it’s a non-natural artlang, then all your features should be serving the language’s artistic goal(s) in some demonstrable (though not necessarily quantifiable) way. A good example of a justifiably kitchen-sink-ish artlang/jokelang is Bill Spruiell’s Yešqūr, which was a language designed to maximally obfuscate bureaucratic discourse. You can see his LCC5 presentation on the language here:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-7O103GFtY

A hilariously twisted language!

> I think all conlangers have seen (and often experienced) this internal pressure before, though. I know I certainly did. I created my very first language (Megdevi); I thought I was the first person ever to create a non-auxlang; I thought it was obviously the best language ever; I presented it in various ways on Conlang-L and did not get the response I was expecting. This is because it really is a pretty bad language. It’s got some uniqueness to it (hard to create something that doesn’t), but it’s not naturalistic; it’s not very good as an auxlang; it’s not particularly “pretty” to listen to; the grammar is not very clever; the lexicon is basically a relex of English; I wasn’t particularly jazzed about all parts of it (making it a poor personal language). It was a mess—which I’ve detailed in part here:
>
> http://dedalvs.com/megdevi.html

I see why you now consider this a weak conlang, and think that your 
criticism-in-hindsight is appropriate. I wouldn't say it is without any 
strengths, but it is indeed not particularly well-designed. I have seen 
many conlangs that were worse, though. But even the greatest talents in 
our art started with mediocre projects, I think. Surely, there is 
nothing of the brilliance of Quenya or Sindarin in Nevbosh and not much 
of it in Naffarin.

My early conlangs weren't particularly good, either. Those I made as a 
teenage boy remained fragmentary, and are all but forgotten by now, and 
worked very much like German or Latin. Later, I went on to create 
Nur-ellen, a descendant of Sindarin which was heavily butchered but 
contained a few ideas I found to work well (but not in a Tolkien-based 
language), and found their way into Old Albic. I also plead guilty 
making one of those horrible Romance "bogolangs" that were fashionable 
around 2000.

> In such a case, though, the natural reaction seems to be if others aren’t blown away by my conlang, they must be wrong. If they come up with specific flaws—objective or subjective—in the language, those measures must be wrong.

I know what you are talking about. It is not easy to distance oneself 
sufficiently from one's own work to take criticism well. It stings.

> In various conlang groups I’ve seen conlangers saying that maybe naturalistic conlangs don’t need to be naturalistic because some feature or feature set of theirs isn’t very natural rather than saying, “I’ve got an artlang that adheres to my personal aesthetic that may or may not be naturalistic at all times”.
>
> In short: If a conlanger wants others to evaluate their work beyond the level of “I like this” vs. “I don’t like this”, they have to provide criteria by which it can be evaluated, whether these criteria are established or not. If a conlanger doesn’t care, they don’t need to worry about it at all. Both approaches are excellent, in that they’re both conlanging, and conlanging is fun. :)

Sure. It is hard to review something if you don't know what is the point 
of it. Any conlang should be gauged against its design goals. For a 
fictional ethnic language, the chief concern is naturalism; it also 
matters where it is imagined to be spoken, as each region has its own 
linguistic "flavour". A language that works great as an indigenous 
language of the North American Pacific Northwest would look quite out of 
place in New Guinea, for instance. But it would be utterly meaningless 
to decry the lack of naturalism in a logical language, just as it would 
be meaningless to chastize a naturalistic fictional language for not 
being more "logical" than natlangs.

--
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