Hallo conlangers!

On 30.05.2016 17:31, Padraic Brown wrote:

> Shanoxilt Cizypij <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>>> an extremely complicated auxlang would be the same kind of disaster as a mixture of Korean with Icelandic
>>> that claims to be a recently discovered new Bantu language and pretends to be natural.
>> That would make for an amusing spurious language hoax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurious_languages
> Sounds like a good old fashioned graftlang!

A graftlang (also known as a bogolang) is a rather specific type of 
language mixture - applying sound changes of one language to another - , 
and is usually not done to make people believe it exists in the real 
world. Brithenig and its many epigones are NOT "spurious languages", 
they are *fictional* languages. There is no intent to fool other people.

>>> The underlying premise of your posting seems to be that it would be beneficial to conlangers and conlanging if it came to be accepted as an
>>> art form by the mainstream of society.  I doubt that this would be the case.
>> In some ways, I think glossopoeisis (and many of my other hobbies, such as tabletop roleplaying) have already become too mainstream.
>> On the one hand, this tends to attract and produce materials that appeal to the lowest common denominator and dilute the impact.
>> But on the other hand, it attracts new perspectives and forces creativity through reaction against assimilation.
> It also sends some of us running for the hills, seeking for some quiet vale to hide in!
>
> I have found it interesting that as social technology has evolved and become more commonplace, I have retreated more and more from it. Many conlangers have large websites and blogs and personal forums and huge wiki presences and so forth. I find that level of public conlanging to be very discomforting.

What do you feel discomforting about people presenting their conlangs in 
a sophisticated way on the Internet, with a reference grammar, a 
dictionary, a corpus of texts, information about the language's imagined 
background etc.? Does it bug you that people go at great length 
describing their conlangs without ever making use of them?

>>> Judging a constructed language is inherently different from judging a play, a painting, or a musical composition. This is because that a conlang
>>> is always subject to change, while other works of art, once released, is finished.
> Not always. Many composers took the route of revision, reorchestration, deorchestration, deletion and suppletion in their works. We're lucky to have a classical music station in town the djs of which will often delve into the creative history of what's about to be played. Amazing just how frequently a given work we might think of as "finished" is but one of several variants.
>
> As far as judging a conlang goes, I believe the difficulty comes not so much from its fluidity (which I agree exists, very few conlangs ever achieve that rarified state of "completion"), but from the fact that glossopoesy as art is an order of magnitude more basic than writing a play or composing an oratorio.
>
> Consider: when Verdi wrote an opera, did he create the concept of opera, or did he create the system of Western art music? No, he simply worked within an already established medium. Same with painters as different as Michaelangelo, Bosch and Picasso. Their basis is the artful application of pigments upon surfaces.

Fine. Most artists don't revolutionize their art, but either follow an 
existing style or gradually evolve a new style from one or more existing 
ones. But there are clearly different styles in conlanging as well. 
Surely, Klingon is not the same style as Sindarin, or is it?

> Consider: when one of us creates a language, we're not putting pigment on surface or writing yet another concerto. A glossopoet, each time he discovers or creates a new conlang is creating a whole new *system*, a whole new *medium*. Our "already established medium" is an order of magnitude more fundamental -- it is (essentially) "human language capacity" itself  from which we devise a novel mode of expression.

I agree with you that conlanging is an art that in a way operates at a 
"higher level" than writing. Writing uses an existing language to 
deliver ideas; conlanging makes new languages. From the standpoint of 
writing, a conlanger creates a new medium - but from the standpoint of 
conlanging, the medium is the space of possible languages, not the 
language itself.

The relationship between writing and conlanging may perhaps be compared 
to that between mural painting and architecture, or between choreography 
and music composition. The conlanger provides a piece of art (a 
language) that a writer may use as a medium, as the architect provides a 
piece of art (a building) that a mural painter may use as a medium.

> The equivalent in music to glossopoesy would be the creation of a novel scale and possibly a harmonic system to go with, and also the fabrication of one or more musical instruments capable of playing within this novel musical system. Furthermore, it would also involve the creation of a novel approach to music -- what ìs musical in this new system? What is nòt musical? And all of this before we ever write a single note of actual music on paper!

There are people who did just this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Partch

There is indeed one among us here on this list: Herman Miller, who 
invented the musics (with tuning systems etc.) of the small furry beings 
for which he created his conlangs.

> How can this be judged? By what standard can this be compared?

It is always difficult to compare different art forms, even if art 
history is full of parallels, like that between abstract visual art and 
atonal music in the 20th century.

> Is this a kind of artform? Absolutely. Is it & should it be mainstream? That's not for us to decide, though as a community I think we have made great strides in helping to formulate some of the language by which conlangery may be described, categorised and indeed judged.

Yep. There are clearly different "schools" or "styles" of conlanging, 
and there is a terminology taking shape that serves to describe and 
review conlangs (much of it just taken over from linguistics).

> That many people are becoming aware of it is no longer in doubt. Many of us on this List, the older members, are now the witnesses to a great sea change within glossopoesy. We are the last generation for whom this could really be said to be the "secret vice", for it is anymore the "not-so secret vice"! Like it or not, it is now within the public consciousness, and it will be judged. So far, I think the fact that production houses and publishers are choosing to hire an actual glossopoet to contribute his art to a larger project cements the notion. After all, those are money hungry ventures and would almost certainly not spend money something like a conlang if they didn't see some kind of value in it. We'll see where it goes from here...

Fine. It is no longer considered "state of the art" at Hollywood to just 
invent some nonce words when a screenplay writer needs some dialogue in 
a fictional language. Instead, they now hire someone like David 
Peterson. (They have even realized that hiring a linguist rather than a 
conlanger to make the conlang is like having the score done by a 
musicologist rather than a composer!) This shows that there is an 
increasing public awareness of the art of language invention in 
worldbuilding fiction.

> But is the conlang itself "the" work of art of a glossopoet? I used to think so. This is an art of very great might -- when you hear in your mind a series of sounds and conceive in your heart a meaning that no one in the world before has combined, that is a powerful moment of creation. When you combine these creations into some work of deep meaning and beauty --- now thát is the true art of the glossopoet, as far as I'm concerned.

Fair - a conlang is there to be *used*. While a grammar and a dictionary 
are appreciable, *all* famous artlangs have become famous because their 
creators made *use* of them! What would have happened if Tolkien had not 
written _The Lord of the Rings_ but instead _A Historical Grammar of the 
Eldarin Languages_ (the book every Quendianist hopes that it will be 
discovered in the master's unpublished manuscripts)? Right, it would 
have never found a publisher, and been marked off as the eccentric hobby 
of an Oxford don and forgotten. Quenya and Sindarin became famous 
because there are samples of them in a best-selling novel.

And a conlang doesn't even need to be well-designed to become famous. 
Quenya and Sindarin *are* extremely well-designed, for sure, but they 
would have become famous if they had not been. Just look at Klingon. 
This is, from a naturalistic standpoint at least, a rather shoddy 
language, with a phoneme inventory that looks as if it had been chosen 
by firing a shotgun at an IPA chart, uninteresting phonotactics, 
implausible morphology (bipersonal conjugation paradigms in natlangs, 
such as Mordvin or Lakota, are *never* as randomly suppletive as that of 
Klingon!), etc. (And "They are not human!" is IMHO a very lame excuse 
for a poorly-designed conlang!) Many amateurs can easily do better. Yet, 
the language has a massive cult following because it is *used* in a 
massively popular media franchise.

A conlang that exists but is not put to any use will only matter to 
other conlangers, if at all. Only a handful of "linguaphiles" will read 
a grammar sketch of a conlang with appreciation! And most conlangers 
want to use their conlangs and see those of other conlangers used. This 
is obvious from the popularity of translation challenges, translation 
relays, conlang conversation threads and similar activities.

> Deciding on the phonology and diddling with the sytax is fun, but this is kind of like deciding on a pallete of pigments or a scheme of orchestration. It is but a mass of potential as of of yet unshapen. The conlang is for us what the mass of clay is to the potter or the gamut & tonal architecture of an instrument to the composer. The conlang itself, like a flute in a case or a chisel in a drawer, awaits úse.
>
> Thus the real art of the glossopoet is to use his creation --- to decide what the conlang is for; to decide how it is used; to make poems and plays and stories and the equivalent of dirty limericks. To come up with entirely new genres and write in them. In short, the real art of a conlanger, from my perspective, is to breathe life into & through the conlang. The conlang becomes my flute and with it I can make something that expresses what is in my heart.

This is true. Indeed, my main conlang Old Albic is meant to be used, 
though it is not yet sufficiently developed, but I have found that the 
best way to develop a conlang is to use it! So far, the phonology 
(synchronic and diachronic) has been laid down; the morphology and 
syntax are well-developed though there is still something to be done; 
there is a thematic dictionary with about 1500 entries; but when I write 
texts, I always find something that is still missing.

The language is intended as a means of personal expression, and exists 
within the framework of a conculture which serves as a vehicle to 
express my views about the world and the human condition. I could not 
express these views in a grammar sketch alone. I need texts written in 
it. The language is indeed a tool - a beautifully crafted tool, perhaps, 
but a tool. So a conlanger is perhaps not the equivalent of a composer 
but of a luthier.

> I daresay I have made a few conlangs. One thing I have never done, however, is work on a conlang for its own sake. Even though, and especially after arriving here, I used to think the conlang itself was "the thing", there was always that nagging undercurrent in my heart that the conlang is not really "the thing" after all. I always, and as absolutely soon as possible (and probably also tóo soon in many cases), pushed beyond mere construction and into the creation of meaningful text. Breathing life through the conlang in order to find some beautiful thing at the other end of the metaphorical flute.

My experience was similar. I made my first fictional languages in my 
mid-teens, for a science fiction universe which has since them been 
scrapped. But indeed, I made the languages *for* something - and be it 
as a source of names of places, people, starships etc., and with the 
intent of placing samples in the text of the novel I was going (but 
never started) to write, just as Tolkien did. (The languages themselves 
are now lost, unfortunately; I would now say that they weren't very 
good, clinging too close to the models of German and Latin, but I don't 
think they were that bad either, even if the "diachronics", which I drew 
up without knowing how real languages change, were just crap.) This is 
also the experience Tolkien made: he liked to say that he created Arda 
to have a place where his languages could be spoken (this probably is 
not the whole truth; at other times, he said that he wanted to create "a 
mythology for England"). His languages thus were made *for* something; 
they were always meant to be *used* in the framework of his secondary world.

A conlang needs a purpose. Perhaps the failure of the League of Lost 
Languages was because it did not afford enough purpose for the 
languages; it was *about* the languages which were an end in themselves.

> After long journey though Auxlangland and Graftlangland and many other weird and wonderful places in between, I am now come back to Queranaran, that very first conlang, the one that set my heart on fire all those years ago and the memory of the moment of its first utterance still flashes clear in my mind. A language of heart and spirit. Of course, finding out how it works is a wonderful, enlightening and intellectually stimulating journey. But it is in allowing it to be used -- in picking up that metaphorical flute and blowing through it -- where intellect and soul commingle that is where the art happens. I may never be counted among the Michaelangelos or Vivaldis, and frankly I don't much care. I don't strive for that. I am happy to experience that same divine spark of creativity they did; the same divine spark thousands of nameless artists have experienced for myriades of years. And I'm happy to share that with anyone who would care to take a look.

Fine. I don't really have something like your Queranaran - my old 
conlangs are now lost but for a few fragments, and I have grown beyond 
them. But Old Albic has been with me for about 15 years now, and it is 
still growing (though currently slowly because I focus more on the 
progressive rock band I started half a year ago and which I now find the 
best thing I have done so far in my life).

>>> I could list people who I would elevate to the level of Mozart, Stravinsky and Brahms and most people here would probably be saying, who?
>>> The people within this discipline are widely varied, containing both professionals and outsiders - like myself.
>> If you have any links to their music, please share them. I would love to hear it.
> Or their conlangs! :)
>
> I'd actually be curious to learn who in the glossopoetic discipline you'd consider the M., S. and B. -- and also why.

An interesting question, and one where we probably won't easily meet 
agreement.

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