Hallo conlangers!

On 20.06.2016 23:46, Padraic Brown wrote:

> On Mon, 20 Jun 2016 22:59:08 +0200, Jörg Rhiemeier <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Hallo conlangers!
>>
>> [...]
>> Understood. Yet, such non-standard usage is always prone to
>> misunderstandings. Words, you know, always mean what people agree on
>> what they mean, and if you use them differently than everyone else,
>> nobody will understand you.
> Actually, I'm with Sai on this one. I have always understood "natural", as
> far as glossopoesy goes, to mean "natural to the medium" or "natural in
> its context". So, a spoken language like Old Albic, existing as it does in an
> iteration of the primary world, is "natural to the medium" because it is a
> human language intended to be spoken by humans within a historical and
> cultural context.

Fair. "Natural to the medium" is something else than "naturalistic" 
(which, in turn, has different meanings among auxlangers and 
artlangers!). It is a much wider concept: a diachronic naturalistic 
conlang like Old Albic is natural to the medium - an imagined human 
historical and cultural context - but many other kinds of conlangs are 
natural to their respective media without being "naturalistic" in either 
the artlang or auxlang sense.

> Likewise, an overtly non-human language, a signed language, a telepathic
> language, a musical language, could each be "natural to their medium"
> without also being fundamentally "the same" in structure or whatever as
> a spoken language.

Sure. For instance, Fith is natural to hypothetical beings who have 
neural circuitry to process stack structures in real time. In fact, the 
grammar of Fith is wonderfully simple - far simpler than any human 
language grammar!

> [...]
> Right. I am not aware of an actual assúmption that the art must be so
> restricted. If anything, I'd say few people are aware enough of signed
> languages to bother working with them. And also, they are far more
> difficult to document and present, whereas it is trivially easy to write a
> short text and grammatical apparatus for others to study and enjoy.

Surely, there is no such restriction, even if most conlangs are ones 
using the human (or human-like) vocal-auditory channel. But some don't! 
There's D. M. Moskowitz's Rikchik, which is signed with tentacles. There 
are various musical languages. There are pasigraphies. There are 
telepathic alien languages. And so on. Alas, they are a small minority 
of conlangs.

> Musical, telepathic and truly alien languages become increasingly more
> difficult to tackle due to us having no experience of any of them.

Right. Some of us are musicians and could work with a musical language 
(yet, there is no community using one); but telepathy is widely held not 
to exist at all, and I doubt that anyone here can rightfully claim to 
possess such abilities. With aliens, we have no data.

> [...]
>> Sure - take fictional extraterrestrial languages, for instance. Most of
>> these languages are either ones that resemble human natlangs, or poor
>> caricatures of those.
> To be fair, this is mostly because these languages are part of some larger
> work. A fictional world where stories are set. It is very difficult to pull off
> a good story and involve a radically different alien language.
>
> I do think Lorinda Taylor did a pretty good job of this in her Termite Queen
> series.

Fine - a humanoid language is more convenient to a science fiction 
writer because he can give samples and use it as a source of names. This 
is much more difficult with a language that doesn't use the 
vocal-auditory channel.

>> It is the same problem as with the rubber mask
>> humanoids one sees in so many science fiction flicks.
> Yep. But on the other hand, it's not really the job of these rubber mask
> aliens to actually bé aliens so much as to be set up as backdrops to the
> action or foils to the humans or stand-ins for whatever human foible is
> being highlighted this week.

You are correct - most science fiction aliens are not attempts to 
realistically portrait plausible extraterrestrial intelligences but 
serve as impersonations of human fears and hopes, or just, as you say, 
as backdrops to the action.

>> Of course, we have
>> no data; but there are good reasons to assume that extraterrestrial
>> intelligences are not necessarily so human-like in their physique - or
>> their languages.
> Well, until we know, we just don't know!

Yep!

>> I have a science fiction universe with alien intelligences on my back
>> burner. Those aliens are not humanoid - nor will be their languages,
>> though I don't have many good ideas about them yet.
> First contact is always a good starting point!

Sure.

>> Yes. There is a vast universe of hypothetical languages to explore
>> beyond the trodden paths.
>
> And as always, plenty of unexplored places right on the trodden paths!

There are!

On 21.06.2016 13:18, BPJ wrote:

> Please note that I did question 'aphonicism' merely on ergonomic grounds.
> Also I did not so much dismiss aphonic langs as hoping for some input on
> what makes them fascinating despite the ergonomic shortcomings apparent to
> me. It seems now I should have made that explicit. Apologies for any
> emotional heat my failure to do so may have engendered! I clearly
> underestimated the abnaturalness of these langs, this meant not as a
> critique of the langs and their creators, but as an assessment of the
> degree to which I'm out of my depth concerning the premises on which they
> are built. I quickly get to a point where everyting is just whirling in my
> head!

I see. There is nothing wrong with staying with the kind of conlangs one 
finds most comfortable doing. Spoken languages are what most people are 
most familiar with, and thus easily accessible. Most of us are not 
familiar with sign languages and how they are put to writing. Telepathic 
and alien languages are anyone's guess, as we don't know any natlangs of 
these kinds.

> For the record I once took the known state of Ancient Egyptian, where part
> of the phonetics are unknown,

I think with most ancient languages, even ones written in alphabets, the 
exact phonetics are not known. Usually, one cannot look much deeper than 
the *phonology*, as the phonetic details are not recorded in the script. 
You mention Egyptian, where vowels are not represented in writing, and 
that may even affect the typology of the language. For instance, the 
grammars I have seen treat it as a language where nouns are not 
case-marked. However, case in Egyptian may have been marked by suffixed 
vowels, as it is in many other Afro-Asiatic languages such as Arabic and 
Berber - and we don't know because those vowels weren't written!

> off on a tangent: what if the phonetics of a
> similar writing system were entirely unknown, would it be possible to
> decode it -- assuming of course that the language recorded be entirely
> naturalistic? I concluded that that would depend on the incidence rate of
> logographic and mixed logographic-phonographic spellings which could be
> used as cues for the meaning of purely phonographic spellings. That's as
> far as I've ventured into such territory!

An interesting thought experiment. I have to think of Hittite, where 
some words are unknown despite occurring in understood texts because 
they are hidden behind logograms. Or Old Chinese, where the meanings of 
the characters are mostly known because these characters are still used 
(though in altered form) and the written language largely understood, 
but the phonology needs to be reconstructed from the later dialects by 
means of the comparative method.

> BTW I wish I shared Jörg's confidence in the high degree of naturalism of
> my own conlangs, since they are meant to be naturalistic! I'm sure he and
> others will spot glaring points of doubt if I ever get my projected
> reference grammars ready enogh!

This is a concern I am familiar with. I have been asking myself several 
times whether such Old Albic features like the autosegmental behaviour 
of vowels, the degree-of-volition marking and the defective case 
paradigm of inanimate nouns could occur in a natlang. They are all 
extrapolated from natlang precedents, but they are extrapolated, and how 
do I know I did not extrapolate too far?

I once observed that if we did not have the example of the Afroasiatic 
languages, triconsonantal roots would perhaps be considered unnatural. 
But they evolved in that family, so they are fine!

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