zompist wrote: ↑Thu Jan 03, 2019 10:21 pm
Wow, you've just proved that criticism doesn't exist. "There is nobody who has the authority to decree rules for everybody else to follow" in music, in novels, in painting, in poetry, in comics. The artist can always say "fuck 'em all!" And so what? How does that remove people's ability to judge the work? When was the papal election that gave you the authority to ban all artistic criticism?
It would be nice to imagine that, after a decade and a half, I'd earned some shred of generosity or benefit of the doubt, even if never any genuine respect. But it's long been clear that that's never going to happen.
First, regarding the difference between conlangs and novels, I already specified: I think I have some idea what a good novel is. Specifically, criticism of novels is valuable only to the extent that novels represent a shared human project, with goals broadly agreed upon through consensus. When that consensus does not obtain, criticism does indeed become unconstructive - imagine the most postmodern, static, hallucinatory, middle-aged-literature-professor-considers-having-and-affair novel you can think of, and imagine it being reviewed by someone who only reads mills and boon. Or imagine mills and boon being reviewed by someone who only reads Literature. Each reviewer can point out things the other book fails to do - but this is not particularly helpful, since the author of the book was not trying to do those things, and their audience did not want them to. In the case of conlangs, when we're talking about the broad sweep of possible conlangs and creating rules that say that one
type of conlang is inherently better than another - naturalistic over non-naturalistic, "complete" over suggestive, fewer cases over more cases, no lexical correspondence with English, etc - then I don't accept that there IS a consensus project, against whose purposes conlangs can be judged. The person who invents a pan-Germanic auxlang, the person who makes a language for alien slug-creatures, the person who tries to create a simulacrum of an obscure amazonian language, the person who creates an attractive-sound near-cypher that players need to learn to complete a computer game, these are all doing
fundamentally different things, and their languages therefore have to be assessed against entirely different standards. They're not like two Dickens novels and you can say which one best achieves Dickens' aims - they're like a catechism and porno story. Both the catechism and the porno are forms of literature, but it makes little sense to say that one is better than the other, or that one is 'how not to' write literature.
Second, you're right: criticism, as you're defining it, doesn't exist - or at any rate shouldn't, as is generally recognised by any critic worth paying attention to. "Criticism" in the artistic sense is a term we use to describe two very different enterprises: reviewing, and critical analysis. Reviewing is where someone describes the impact a work of art has had on them, and that they believe it may have on others, and attempts to explain why this may be. Critical analysis is where someone attempts to tease out the implications of the work - either as seen by the audience or as intended by the author - and how those implications (intentionally or unintentionally) arise. Neither of these enterprises involves comparing the artwork to the sort of fixed set of "rules for writing" that alice describes, and people who attempt to concoct such rules are generally regarded critically by reviewers and critical analysts. Perhaps some people thought they should do that, in Victorian times, but we have progressed. These days, such "rules" are generally limited to commercial ambitions ("how to write a bestseller" and the like), where they can be judged, at least in theory, by the objective success of their rules by the standard of commercial utility.
So if people propose such rules for novels, but "it seems a lot harder to come up with similar rules for conlanging", the message we should take from that isn't that we should work harder to invent such rules for conlangs, but that the proposed (and invariably inconsistent, and out of touch with either actual acknowledged classics or mass popularity) rules for novels should be regarded more skeptically.
And third, regarding your "I know you are but what am I?" argument: I never said I wanted to ban artistic criticism. I never even said I wanted to ban bad artistic criticism. But criticism is itself liable to be criticised, and when people criticise badly, their criticism should be criticised. Criticism that holds art up to preformed "rules" and "standards" is bad criticism. Bad as criticism, that is - it may, of course, still be excellent art.
Profitability is a red herring. What's the formula for making a profitable conlang? There is no set of features shared by Quenya, Na'vi, Klingon, and Dothraki but no other conlangs, nor are these clearly "Dan Brown" sellouts unlike the lofty "James Joyce" conlangs. Making your words pronounceable is not something you do to make money; it's something you do to avoid hassle. But that may or may not be a goal for a commercial project. Surely one of the most "profitable" conlangs ever is Klingon, which is not at all easy to pronounce... indeed it was purposely made to be alien for English speakers.
My throwaway remarks were not intended to be a 'formula', but a suggestion of the
sort of guidelines that could be appropriate for commercial conlanging. Whether they are actually the best guidelines is another question, and not one I'm interested in. My point was that when you have a commercial project, you have an inherent standard of success - a commercial one. But when you have not committed to a commercial project, or some other project with goals define by others (work on commission, for example), then there are no objective standards that can meaningfully be imposed.
It seems pretty strange to forget
Then maybe, MAYBE, in the spirit of decency and charity, you could try imagining that I have not "forgotten" anything, and that if your interpretation of my words relies on an assumption of my unaccountable and 'strange' forgetfulness, perhaps your interpretation is flawed.
that this board has some pretty high demands on conlangs
I agree that some people on the board have indeed been unkind and judgemental in their criticism of other conlangers. I don't agree that this is objectively a good thing, or that this unkindness has been in any way objectively justified. To the extent that people have been unkind to one another,
they have been wrong to be so.
But there is an important distinction to be drawn here between our opinions of a conlang qua art, and our opinions of a conlanger and their processes qua craft. When you talk about the "demand" of linguistic knowledge - that's not a demand made of a language, it's a demand made of a linguist.
When we see a conlang that appears non-naturalistic, or that appears a cipher of English, it is perfectly legitimate to draw attention to this, and ask whether this is what the conlanger intended. If it seems that it is NOT what was intended, then we can criticise the
construction of the language, the craft of the linguist, by its own standards - it has done something the author did not intend. The author can then accept that her language is not what they intended, either change her intent to match her work, or change her work to match her intent. Pointing out that there is a conflict between intent and effect is entirely reasonable. There is also a natural, but sometimes perhaps over-hasty, tendency to assume, as a default, that the intent of a stranger is similar to our own intent - so, because most of us here intend to create naturalistic, non-European languages, there is a default assumption that others will do too, and provided that that is expressed with appropriate respectfulness, there is nothing wrong with that. Conversely, on a forum that skewed auxlang, there would be other assumptions about intent.
But what should we do when that assumption is denied? When somebody says that they are not intending to create a naturalistic conlang? Should we, with methru, say "oi, you'd better have a good reason for that!" Should we say that according to the "rules" and "standards" and "demands" of conlanging, what they have done is "how not to conlang"? No, I don't think we should. Because then we've moved from criticising the craft, criticising the work according to the standards laid out for it by its author, to criticising the standards set by the author. The former is the domain of reason, but the later is the domain of the soul, and of personal taste. It's meaningless to say that Klingon, or Esperanto, or Lojban, or Ithkuil, or indeed Quenya, are
bad conlangs, examples of
how not to conlang, that they have broken the "rules" or fallen short of the "standards" - we can only say they may not be to our taste. Because they were never meant to be. They each had their own objectives. Similarly, an auxlanger is equally unjustified in dismissing a naturalist conlang - because it never intended to be an auxlang, and so the standards that might be applied to auxlangs are irrelevant.
That is, I think the appropriate form of "criticism" of conlangs is not "you shouldn't do that, it's against the rules", but "did you mean to do that?"
I seem to remember you bringing up in another thread that you'd created a test for how SAE a phonology is.
Well, it's mostly other people bringing it up, unfortunately, and I always feel a bit bad, because it's not a great test. But the point is, I never suggested that having a less SAE phonology made a conlang better - indeed, most of my conlangs have been fairly SAE in their phonology. The purpose of such a test, beyond curiosity, is in helping to bring unchallenged assumptions to the surface - so that an author can realise how specifically European their phonology is, or indeed how remarkably weird their phonology is,
and decide for themselves how they feel about that. So that the nature of their work can be more informed by conscious choice, and hence more in line with their own determined preferences, and less forced upon them by unexamined assumptions that may be in conflict with their own ambitions.
It's true that some people seem to have regarded that test in a more moralistic way, treating a 'less SAE' score as in some way objectively superior. But to the extent that people have done that, I don't endorse it, or agree with it.
And sure, like any other artist, a conlanger can do whatever they want. What's the downside? Maybe a contentious forum thread. Or maybe quiet awe as everyone reassesses their criteria, who knows. But in any case, people are free to like or dislike the conlanger's work, and their opinion might even be worth listening to.
But if their opinion is simply that I have done conlanging "wrong", then it's not something I should be cowed into accepting.