Conlanging, privilege

[sasasha]

PSA: This is not a continuation of recent discussions involving Bob. This is a related topic inspired by things he has said, but Bob's recent posts are more sensible and show willingness to learn about presentation of ideas. Please don't offer more of the same commentary that I've just spent the morning reading: there's enough already.

Announcement to Bob: Hi Bob. This isn't an attack of any sort. Nor is it about your work. It's about a wider issue that I felt you heavily implied between the lines of several messages.

**

Quoting from several threads -- please excuse that:

It's all over my website, but I have a BA Linguistics from Michigan State University from 2009. I actually got this *degree in science* instead of a BS in petroleum engineering. And I've helped so many people all around the world as a result, even outside of what I've done over facebook on the 3 large facebook groups I run.

I also do facebook and zompist bboard posts about it and reach a lot of people that science is crucial …

I study so many languages, there are actually very reasonable limits to the amount of time I can waste on people who don't appreciate what I've done. And what I do to promote science and education and children's education, worldwide.

In the Third World, most people die before 30, like in rural areas. But some of them get online and the ones that do get online, they interact with the ones that don't. So I have my facebook groups for people like that, and then also for everyone. People understand to varying degrees.

Especially difficult is when people don't carefully read what I've put online and then say all sorts of lies about it. But this happens all the time on large facebook groups and usually I just block people like that because it's obvious they're either not scholars or they're lazy schmucks who think nothing of boorishly trampling on my scholarship.

All this I suffer from First World people, while they fill their faces with food and cast darts at their televisions, counting their decades of "merriment" on both hands, all fingers intact most of the time, so that I can reach the Third World people and get some wisdom out of them to live a happier life, maybe share some of my expensive and painful education and hard side work researching and what else.

[[ I went back through later to edit this section. It's so true! I'll just leave it. ]]

Zompist Bboard is a blast from the past in a lot of ways: The bizaare anonymous names, the delightful anonymous personalities. Can't you folks give me more welcome when I visit "the old ivory tower" ?

There was another quote, which has now been deleted, in which Bob used the term 'racism'/'racist' to characterise, if I read and remember it correctly, some of the criticism against his work.

**

I don't know what comment to offer, but especially at the present time, I thought it important to gather these comments and throw out an open question: does anyone feel that their conlanging has been held back by factors such as global wealth inequality or institutional racism? If so, it may be prudent to gather such perspectives for everyone's collective awareness.

[Pedant]

I'm just going to go ahead and say "probably not". My words are my own, my languages are my own, and they have nothing to do with the features of the face whence the voice emanates. There was one incident where a couple of people were rather upset with me for using terminology that (unbeknownst to me) was insulting when describing a race of people I'd been working on, but beyond that it's been quite smooth sailing. These are people that I've made up, and if I have found work as a conlanger it's because I put the most and best effort into my work and my demonstration. (There was one time that I'm 94% I was rejected from a position for being male, but admittedly they said they would mainly be considering female applicants so it was a long shot in any case). To be completely honest, I'm still not completely sure why being of a certain race would affect one's conlanging--although naturally class may be a factor, in that it becomes more difficult to access not only linguistic texts but even basic linguistic resources, or limits one's energy to do so.
Of course, I speak as an educated Canadian who lives a fairly secluded life (with a financial rough patch or two as I grew up), so this may not be the norm.

[Curlyjimsam]

It's not a great problem for me personally, but undoubtedly the amount of free time you can afford to have is going to greatly affect the extent to which conlanging is a viable hobby. Access to books is also going to have some effect (though it's possible to do a good deal with just online resources, perhaps particularly if you're just starting out), as is probably the general amount/quality of education you've received.

[Kuchigakatai]

There was another quote, which has now been deleted, in which Bob used the term 'racism'/'racist' to characterise, if I read and remember it correctly, some of the criticism against his work.

**

I don't know what comment to offer, but especially at the present time, I thought it important to gather these comments and throw out an open question: does anyone feel that their conlanging has been held back by factors such as global wealth inequality or institutional racism? If so, it may be prudent to gather such perspectives for everyone's collective awareness.

Sure there is, and it falls within the larger topic of this kind of differences in access to education and information. Consider that much of conlanging refers to academic research in linguistics, which to this day continues to be largely paywalled behind prohibitive prices. It is not unusual to come across 20-page articles sold for US$40 and 200-page books books for US$300, even when the resource is electronic and sellable over the Internet, and even though linguists hardly get any returns from sales (example, not available at the linguist's homepage either). Conlangers at universities in the West with access to these things are naturally some of the most privileged on the planet. Conlangers (including many or most in the First World even) circumvent much of this with book and article piracy, an obviously illegal practice nevertheless, and it's not like everything is available either.

This is of course accompanied in differences in literacy (even when there's some access to education/information), knowledge of major languages (especially English of course), computer literacy (user interfaces are a language of their own really, just try to watch many older people today using a computer), access to the Internet...

Pabappa makes a good point about some conlanging being possible with none of this; I hope all of us know the example of the Damin ceremonial language by now. Although I'd say there is a qualitative difference between grammatically-naïve (semi-)relexes with different sounds (of which Damin is in fact a nice example) or the kind of "merged" languages that people who learn or speak more than one language sometimes intentionally make up (I recall a user here from years ago called Rhetorica who as a teenage student created her consistent mix of English+French+Latin, with a grammar and vocabulary of its own, without knowing anything of conlanging and no more grammar than what she saw in class), and on the other hand the kind of batshit things *I* can come up with using all the linguistics stuff I've learned. If you have an adequate mental model, you can explore gaps and possibilities more easily.

I mean, I can do what they do, but they can hardly do what I can do with what I know of languages and linguistics and express it in intelligible ways to other people on top of that. I'm part of the Spanish conlanging group on Facebook ("the" because there's only one really), and I sometimes see people presenting interesting things in pretty badly explained ways. I recall someone some four years ago once posting a funny four-way (square) symmetrical morphosyntactic alignment, with labels and an explanation that were so confusing that it took some argument for the more knowledgeable among us to work it out from the examples. The conlanger correctly pointed out the parallelism in the axes of the square, but did not have the concepts and jargon to make his design intelligible, and his bad labels coming from misunderstood transitivity and the nominative/accusative cases did not help. This mostly pertains to conlanging as a social activity though.

[zompist]

The nice thing about conlanging is that you can get started with nothing more than a paper and pen. Many of us have more pages than we like to think about covered with earnest juvenilia. And I expect most of us started knowing just one language, or not more than two.

If you have Internet access, you can get enough stuff to keep you busy for years. I don't mean to minimize the academic pricing nonsense, especially as it affects me-- there's books I greatly desire but can't afford. On the other hand, there's amazing books available for free.

[elemtilas]

Sure there is, and it falls within the larger topic of this kind of differences in access to education and information. Consider that much of conlanging refers to academic research in linguistics,

This is true of the last twenty-some years especially. Going back to the earliest days of the Conlang List and Usenet language groups, it was clear to me that language invention was going to take a turn for the academical. I think this largely goes hand-in-hand with more with the Realist School.

Before that time, things were I suppose, a little wilder.

Pabappa makes a good point about some conlanging being possible with none of this;

This one got a chuckle! As if the Internet were the answer to everything!

I guess we both show our ages. I think perhaps only someone in their twenties or thirties could honestly say the above with a straight face. The rest of us, few in number, never even knowing anyone was even doing the same thing we were, and without access to anything more than a general encyclopedia & dictionary, simply got on with it. Plenty of language invention was possible with "none of that!"

does anyone feel that their conlanging has been held back by factors such as global wealth inequality or institutional racism? If so, it may be prudent to gather such perspectives for everyone's collective awareness.

Not at all.

There was no wealth or privilege of any kind in my growing up. That didn't stop me from making worlds, and eventually languages. Never had access to linguistics journals, and even now, generally don't bother with much of that. (That kind of language invention isn't to my taste.) When I got to university, I happily immersed myself in I guess what you would call the older generations of philologists (Wright & Skeat & the like). I don't consider myself any the worse a glossopoet for not being conversant in 21st century theories & research.

On racism: that's an interesting question indeed! For a very long time, the standing joke was that the standard average language inventor was (if I recall correctly), a "gay, bearded, left handed Lithuanian". I'm sure glasses wearing was in there too. Simply because there were relatively many Lithuanians who happened to be left handed and same sex attracted! I suspect that "institutional racism" is not (yet) a thing in the language invention community. Other kinds of ismistic intolerances have crept in over the years, but that's not one of them.

[Raphael]

The nice thing about conlanging is that you can get started with nothing more than a paper and pen.

In principle, yes. In practice, I personally don't think I could have done even my very limited attempts at naming languages without the tools on your website (phono, gen, and the SCA). Then again, most conlangers are more committed than me.

[Curlyjimsam]

Quite a lot (certainly far from all) of recent research is available for free online. The stuff access to a good university library is most helpful for isn't 21st century theory, it's obscure grammars of obscure languages published in about 1960, which can be pretty much impossible to get hold of otherwise.

[elemtilas]

Quite a lot (certainly far from all) of recent research is available for free online. The stuff access to a good university library is most helpful for isn't 21st century theory, it's obscure grammars of obscure languages published in about 1960, which can be pretty much impossible to get hold of otherwise.

This is what good used book shops were designed for! Course, they're closed now for Pandemic Holidays, but at least the ones in this area have proven to be veritable cornucopias of grammatical goodness.

[Ares Land]

*puts on his beret and striped shirt on, places baguette under arm, lights a cigarette*
Have you heard about Pierre Bourdieu and cultural capital?

Well, conlanging requires an awful lot of culture capital. You need to develop an interest in languages, have a concept that there is such a thing as linguistics. For the kind of conlangs that is valued these days (and rightly so!) you also need to deconstruct a lot of stereotype about non-IE languages. (You may have grown up speaking dialectal Arabic at home, if you run with the usual assumptions that it's low-class gibberish, you'll still create Latinish conlangs, which would be kind of a pity)

In other words, conlanging is a very privileged hobby. It doesn't require much in financial terms; but the requirements I listed above are by no means a given.

Of course, I can't possibly comment on whether that's a problem or not, because I'm very privileged myself in many ways.

I have noticed though that there haven't been a lot of beginning conlangers, and that those that come don't tend to stay. Perhaps the very high level of linguistics knowledge (which is a very good thing, don't get me wrong!) can be intimidating?

[xxx]

I beg to differ...
linguistic creation is something natural, more or less advanced and more or less imperious, which has more to do with art than with science .
I see the use of linguistics to create languages more as a perversion of this normal process...
a scholastic takeover of a creative field it should only describe...
I confirm the possibility of creation with all the inventors of my pre-internet generation without the use of any linguistics knowledge..

[Ares Land]

Oh yes, certainly. Though if you like to share your work with others, linguistics offers a common language (one to which, perhaps, we sometimes stick too rigidly) and if you work alone, a nice and compact way to take notes. But I believe different formats ought to be tried...

[xxx]

for me, a posteriori linguistics brings,above all, the astonishment of the kinship of all human languages, of which each creation, even autistic or autarkic, shares with another, somewhere in the world, an obvious family resemblance...

[Ares Land]

for me, a posteriori linguistics brings,above all, the astonishment of the kinship of all human languages, of which each creation, even autistic or autarkic, shares with another, somewhere in the world, an obvious family resemblance...

That's amazing if you can make it work; but I can't. Without linguistic knowledge, what my brain wants to do is recreate Latin.

[zompist]

Well, conlanging requires an awful lot of culture capital. You need to develop an interest in languages, have a concept that there is such a thing as linguistics. For the kind of conlangs that is valued these days (and rightly so!) you also need to deconstruct a lot of stereotype about non-IE languages.

On the other hand, a non-European conlanger often starts with what would be a luxury to many of us: deep knowledge of one or more non-European languages, with an IE language to boot.

It's true that people can be taught bad attitudes about their native languages. But the same culture means that Westerns have to unlearn some of their own prejudices.

I'd also add that naturalistic conlanging is relatively recent. For a century and a half the typical conlang was an auxlang. Auxlangs were created in a wide variety of countries, and learned in an even wider array.

I have noticed though that there haven't been a lot of beginning conlangers, and that those that come don't tend to stay. Perhaps the very high level of linguistics knowledge (which is a very good thing, don't get me wrong!) can be intimidating?

Probably. Most people who take up a new hobby are easily scared away. This is why I ask people not to eat the newbies. Still, people won't thrive here unless they find learning new things to be fun.

[elemtilas]

Some interesting ideas here.

I don't think we need an interest in languages per se in order to invent languages. Little children do this quite naturally and they have no interest in languages at all. For the same reason they pretend to do all sorts of things (playing house, playing school, building cities out of legos), they make languages simply because they can --- because it is an act of creation. It's fun and serves no practical purpose and derives from no practical resource. As for the "concept of linguistics" -- well, we've only had that for a little over a century! We've had philology for a while longer (and it's different) and we've had the concept of grammar for a very long time. And we've been making languages all that while and probably even right back to our very beginnings as a speaking race. They may not be up to snuff for some (philosophical languages, I'm thinking about you!). But that just leads to the next interesting idea: that of "what is valued these days".

In my experience, what is valued anymore is more a product of technical craft than art or creativity. We've got all the instruction manuals on how to make languages, we've got all the Youtube tutorials to show us how it's done, we've got all the tick boxes for what we need to put into the language, we've got the flow charts of what to do when and, by circular motion, we end up with a product that pretty much matches the picture on the cover. So many people ask for the books, so many people (new language inventors, that is) buy the books, so many people follow the books: it's no wonder their concept of "what is valued these days" is what is found in the books!

And what is found in the books is not art and only rarely creativity.

Technical nicety is all well and good, but relying on a science to do art yields only soulless artifice. The questions we see in so many forums are "is this chain of sound change plausible"; "is it likely that there are so many of this kind of phoneme"; "I'd like to do this, but it doesn't seem to happen in real languages..." A disheartening direction.

I've long hated the very term "conlang". It's ugly. It reminds one of some underhanded criminal activity. I've never thought, certainly of myself, and of very few others as "constructors". We don't "construct". We, generally artlangers, invent, discover, find serendipetously that which is within the funny little parts of our brains that make us want to talk. This trend towards scientifically engineered model languages --- that which is "valued these days" --- is exactly what I've come to find so saddening, maddening, and even disturbing about language invention in general. More and more as time has gone on. It's all blueprints and technical schemes. There's little art valued these days.

I find it a good general principle to keep science in its place: as a servant of Man, not as our artistic directorate. To that end, I find linguistics is really only useful in language invention or glossopoetry for cogent description of what's going on in our languages, and of course for understanding what's going on in others', not for determining the nature, structure, or contents of the work being engaged in.

[bradrn]

In my experience, what is valued anymore is more a product of technical craft than art or creativity. We've got all the instruction manuals on how to make languages, we've got all the Youtube tutorials to show us how it's done, we've got all the tick boxes for what we need to put into the language, we've got the flow charts of what to do when and, by circular motion, we end up with a product that pretty much matches the picture on the cover. So many people ask for the books, so many people (new language inventors, that is) buy the books, so many people follow the books: it's no wonder their concept of "what is valued these days" is what is found in the books!

And what is found in the books is not art and only rarely creativity.

Technical nicety is all well and good, but relying on a science to do art yields only soulless artifice. The questions we see in so many forums are "is this chain of sound change plausible"; "is it likely that there are so many of this kind of phoneme"; "I'd like to do this, but it doesn't seem to happen in real languages..." A disheartening direction.

As one of the ‘is this chain of sound change plausible’ people, I think that you’re missing a very important part of conlanging as practised these days: the intellectual side of things. For me, conlanging is both an aesthetic and intellectual pursuit. If I want to consider aesthetics alone, I’m certainly better off ignoring all that stuff you mention and just doing what I want — but there’s no fun (for me at least) in just making up stuff that sounds good. I find it much more satisfying to work through the challenges of ‘how am I going to make what I like (the aesthetic side) while simultaneously making it realistic (the intellectual side)?’. And that is something which is difficult — and hence interesting — for me to do. (I see this as similar to working in a constrained form such as a fugue or canon: they have rigid rules on what you can do, but that never stopped people composing amazing music in those formats.)

… This trend towards scientifically engineered model languages --- that which is "valued these days" --- is exactly what I've come to find so saddening, maddening, and even disturbing about language invention in general. …

What ‘scientifically engineered model languages’ are you talking about? From what I’ve seen, the sort of realistic conlangs which are preferred these days, are — like any Earthly language — messy, full of irregularities and exceptions, and entwined with culture: the exact opposite of ‘scientifically engineered’. (At least, that’s what the best ones should be like: there are many conlangs which don’t do this even though they should.)

[elemtilas]

As one of the ‘is this chain of sound change plausible’ people, I think that you’re missing a very important part of conlanging as practised these days: the intellectual side of things. For me, conlanging is both an aesthetic and intellectual pursuit. If I want to consider aesthetics alone, I’m certainly better off ignoring all that stuff you mention and just doing what I want — but there’s no fun (for me at least) in just making up stuff that sounds good. I find it much more satisfying to work through the challenges of ‘how am I going to make what I like (the aesthetic side) while simultaneously making it realistic (the intellectual side)?’. And that is something which is difficult — and hence interesting — for me to do. (I see this as similar to working in a constrained form such as a fugue or canon: they have rigid rules on what you can do, but that never stopped people composing amazing music in those formats.)

Fair enough. We agree, at the least, that language invention is an intellectual pursuit! Any art, whether music or literature or visual has some element of the intellectual about it!

… This trend towards scientifically engineered model languages --- that which is "valued these days" --- is exactly what I've come to find so saddening, maddening, and even disturbing about language invention in general. …

What ‘scientifically engineered model languages’ are you talking about? From what I’ve seen, the sort of realistic conlangs which are preferred these days, are — like any Earthly language — messy, full of irregularities and exceptions, and entwined with culture: the exact opposite of ‘scientifically engineered’. (At least, that’s what the best ones should be like: there are many conlangs which don’t do this even though they should.)

Exactly: they model human languages. Even those that are supposed to be used by non-humans. An invented language being messy and full of irregularities and cultural baggage doesn't imply that it isn't modeled using science, in this case, linguistics (and socio-linguistics).

[bradrn]

… This trend towards scientifically engineered model languages --- that which is "valued these days" --- is exactly what I've come to find so saddening, maddening, and even disturbing about language invention in general. …

What ‘scientifically engineered model languages’ are you talking about? From what I’ve seen, the sort of realistic conlangs which are preferred these days, are — like any Earthly language — messy, full of irregularities and exceptions, and entwined with culture: the exact opposite of ‘scientifically engineered’. (At least, that’s what the best ones should be like: there are many conlangs which don’t do this even though they should.)

Exactly: they model human languages. Even those that are supposed to be used by non-humans. An invented language being messy and full of irregularities and cultural baggage doesn't imply that it isn't modeled using science, in this case, linguistics (and socio-linguistics).

In that case, if this is what you mean by ‘scientifically engineered model languages’, then why do you find a trend towards these languages to be ‘so saddening, maddening, and even disturbing’? I don’t at all understand how you could make that statement.

[Ares Land]

In many ways the focus on technique is, I think, the product of the Standard Fantasy Language, which, to put it kindly, was lacking in technical expertise (though not on ae, y and, oh god yes, apostrophes)

In many ways, it's a lot like drawing. If you want to draw the human figure well, with a good amount of detail, you're going to have to study it. Which doesn't mean you can't draw, say, angels, but then you need to careful study birds and human babies and come up with a credible way to attach those wings...

The problem with a more instinctive approach is that following the language instinct is actually very hard! Most of what we learn through study of linguistics are ways to free ourselves of our preconception, which are shaped by our education and culture.
Or, to put it another way, left to our own devices, we'd all create relexifications of our native languages, with bits and pieces of Latin, because, well, we're taught that all grammar is Latin grammar.
I mean, it didn't occur to me that a language could have head-marking until I read about it, even though spoken French, my native tongue, actually does quite a bit of it.

As for the "concept of linguistics" -- well, we've only had that for a little over a century! We've had philology for a while longer (and it's different) and we've had the concept of grammar for a very long time. And we've been making languages all that while and probably even right back to our very beginnings as a speaking race.

Maybe I should have narrowed the focus a little on language creation as an art, not as a children's game, or as a philosophical study, or as an utopian scheme.
Is there any evidence of artistic creation of entire languages for artistic purposes before Tolkien?


That said, the realistic approach, or the Realistic School (I love the idea of belonging to an artistic school!) suits me very well, but I don't think there's anything wrong with other approaches. And I'd love to see other schools put in practice!