There are 2 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: Why Brithenig ain't an engelang
From: R A Brown
2.1. Re: Conlang classification
From: Jörg Rhiemeier
Messages
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1.1. Re: Why Brithenig ain't an engelang
Posted by: "R A Brown" r...@carolandray.plus.com
Date: Sat Aug 25, 2012 8:00 am ((PDT))
On 25/08/2012 14:29, Padraic Brown wrote:
[snip]
>>
>> But that's not what I said. If a team of linguists get
>> together to create a conlang for research purposes,
>> with clearly defined design goals including
>> naturalism, then that's an engelang.
>
> Well, given my recollection of Brithenig's early days,
> as well as Andrew's own description of the language
> ("Brithenig started as a thought- experiment to create a
> Romance language that might have evolved if Latin
> speakers had been a sufficient number to displace Old
> Celtic as the spoken language of the people in Great
> Britain."), it's very much like it is at least sòme kind
> of engelang, or at least has tendencies in that
> direction.
I fail to see how that is implied in Andrew's description.
> There was, not so much a "team of linguists" as a bunch
> of interested linguophiles who came together to help in
> the creation of a language for (some non-scientific)
> research purpose (the "thought experiment" aspect) and
> with fairly specific goals in mind (the creation of a
> language that would simulate what could have evolved in
> Britain, etc. etc.)
That is not my recollection. I was very much under the
impression that Brithenig was largely Andrew's work. I
cannot ever recall any discussion about what British Vulgar
Latin was like; that, I think, is fairly fundamental if this
is an engelang.
I did not get the impression when I first corresponded with
Andrew way back in May 1996 that there was a bunch of
glossophiles joining in. Also I was very much under the
impression that Andrew had already given his language a
Welsh-like phonology and orthography, and that this was not
up for discussion.
Yes, by April 1996 John Cowan, yourself, Peter Skye, John
Schilke, Frank George Valoczy, the Celticonlang List, Sally
Caves, Douglas Mosier and Martin Bertagnon had all joined
in, or were included in the mailings. But by this stage, it
was, surely, a question of tidying up finer points -
discussing, e.g. how final 'soft-c' and 'soft-g'. I still
have a copy of my reply. It's clear that preferences were
being expressed largely on grounds of taste and aesthetics.
Unfortunately I haven't kept all the correspondence, only
some. I do not recall anything seriously engelangy - no
goals that could be evaluated in an _objective_ way. My own
impression was that to many of those listed, it was the
"Celticity" of Brithenig that appealed, which seems to me a
somewhat _subjective_ and aesthetic appeal.
[snip]
>
> My, perhaps insufficiently well asked, question was
> simply why put an experimental conlang with specific
> design goals, that might otherwise be called an
> engelang, or at least has deliberately engineered
> qualities, at the far artistic end of the spectrum when
> there are plenty of very fine and entirely artistic
> conlangs that have no explicit design goals. Things like
> Teonaht or Maggel
I thought the objective of Maggel was to be as darned
awkward as possible ;)
> or any of dozens of others that were made simply for the
> pure joy of making a language.
Andrew Smith write on the Brithenig introduction page: "I
did this for fun ... I enjoy doing language creation. It's
a hobby."
> It's not that Brithenig doesn't belong in the box at
> all; but given what we know about it and how it came
> about, I think it is very fair to question its placement
> on that box.
Box? Who said anything about a box? Haven't you heard of
the Gnoli triangle?
[snip]
>
> But I think we should be careful about wording, though.
> I made Avantimannish to look and sound Germanic. And
> feedback so far has confirmed that it looks and sounds
> Germanic. Does that make it, even "to an extent", an
> engelang? I don't think so.
Sorry - by your own admission a goal was to make the
language look and sound Germanic! If that ain't a goal, i
don't know what is.
> There is no specific model, no specific goals, no
> specific definition or success or failure --
You stated a specific goal. What is the specific definition
of the success or failure of Brithenig?
> nothing other than my own sense of aesthetics at work.
To produce a Romance language with a Welsh-like phonology
and even more Welsh-like spelling seems to me to be
reflecting Andrew's sense of aesthetics. True - Andrew was
always careful to justify his choices, but I think it is
really ignoring facts to rule out the play of aesthetics in
Brithenig.
> So, if Brithenig ain't an engelang, it certainly lives
> in the marches
Isn't it in order to allow for the marches that Claudio
Gnoli proposed the triangle model in late 1997 or early
1998? He felt his own conlang, Liva, had elements of both
artlang and loglang about it.
> and speaks with an engelangish accent and wears some
> distinctly engelangish clothing and even walks with a
> slightly engelangish swagger!
The main problem with the engelang model, as I see it, is
*_objective_ evaluation.* The end criterion is only a vague
"to create a Romance language that might have evolved if
Latin speakers had been a sufficient number to displace Old
Celtic as the spoken language of the people in Great Britain."
OK - Brithenig _might_ have - but how do you _objectively_
evaluate all the choices made?
--
Ray
==================================
http://www.carolandray.plus.com
==================================
Nid rhy hen neb i ddysgu.
There's none too old to learn.
[WELSH PROVERB]
Messages in this topic (29)
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________________________________________________________________________
2.1. Re: Conlang classification
Posted by: "Jörg Rhiemeier" joerg_rhieme...@web.de
Date: Sat Aug 25, 2012 8:04 am ((PDT))
Hallo conlangers!
On Saturday 25 August 2012 09:39:57 R A Brown wrote:
> On 24/08/2012 19:59, And Rosta wrote:
> [...]
> > I had better hedge that Brithenig had been introduced
> > into the discussion (as I understood it) as an academic
> > exercise in working out what a Romance lg in Britain
> > would have been like
>
> Always best to go to the source and check what a language
> creator actually says:
> "Brithenig started as a thought-experiment to create a
> Romance language that might have evolved if Latin speakers
> had been a sufficient number to displace Old Celtic as the
> spoken language of the people in Great Britain."
> http://steen.free.fr/brithenig/introduction.html
>
> "that might have evolved" is rather different IMO from
> "would have looked like."
Indeed. This is something that is often gotten wrong about
alternative histories. They do not lay out what *would* have
happened if some event went otherwise, but what *could* have
happened. The former is something we will never know; the
latter is something that can be explored.
> In all my correspondence with Andrew he has never claimed
> that Brithenig is what a British Romance would actually have
> looked like. Indeed, more than once in the past he has
> encouraged me to develop what I think a British Romance
> language would have looked like. So far, I have not taken
> up this invitation; but possibly if I have time before I
> quit this mortal coil.
That would be fine. There are certainly many possible ways
what a Britanno-Romance language could have looked like, and
Brithenig is just one of them.
I also entertained the idea of developing my own Britanno-
Romance language (for the League of Lost Languages) that
would go down a different road than Brithenig. Alas, I have
enough project to pursue already, and I have no concete plans
for this language.
> > (possibly with certain auxiliary assumptions like that it
> > would follow Welsh diachrony),
>
> With assumptions all the way through - not possibly, but
> necessarily so. I've listed the more important assumptions
> already.
Sure. Brithenig is made, as far as I understand it, with a
_ceteris paribus_ approach which changes the course of events
just enough to make the desired alternative outcome - a living
Britanno-Romance language in this case - possible and plausible.
That is an approach often taken by alternative historians.
As far as I understand this, this meant that the sound changes
of the language would not differ more from those of Welsh than
necessary. Of course, that doesn't mean that they would be
"the same": they cannot really be because the starting point
is different, such that Andrew had to apply modifications in
order to have them make sense.
> > and my intention is to put forward certain arguments not
> > about Brithenig per se but rather about any conlang that
> > is an attempt to take a natlang and model, as an academic
> > exercise, its probable future diachrony to work out what
> > it would most likely be like, given whatever auxiliary
> > assumptions about influences on its diachrony.
>
> But, with respect, by talking of _probable_ future diachrony
> you've already shifted from the _possible_ future diachrony
> of Brithenig. Andrew quite clearly says on his introductory
> page: "I did this for fun."
Yes. He did this for fun, nothing else. He found the
elaboration of a fictional Britanno-Romance language an
interesting and entertaining challenge to pursue.
> > To avoid irrelevant discussions about the nature of
> > Brithenig per se, I'll refer instead to a hypothetical
> > Neo-Romano-British (NRB) conlang, an attempt to
> > 'forward-reconstruct' what a Romance lg in Britain would
> > most likely have been like.
>
> IMHO discussion about Brithenig has been irrelevant. The
> type of problems that have been referred to will crop up
> with any attempt to forward construct a NRB. All you do
> below is to shift from have one person make subjective
> decisions to a committee making more objective decisions.
Yes. These are problems of altlangs in general.
> [snip]
>
> > Developing NRB would be a perfectly valid and viable
> > academic exercise, amenable to reasoned discussion about
> > which candidate design best satisfied the goal of NRB,
> > and with emerging consensus about which solutions were
> > the likeliest. New discoveries about language or the
> > history of Dark Age Britain might move the goalposts,
> > but the goalposts would move for everybody, and
> > evaluations of the success of a given design candidate
> > would always be relative to a set of goalposts.
>
> But that is an entirely different scenario from Brithenig!
It is.
> The scenario you put forward is of a _group_ of people who,
> presumably, seriously want to construct what in their view
> is the the most probable end result of the development of
> a romance language in Britain. These guys are going to argue
> out every stage and make what seems to them the most likely
> choice.
The result of such a group process would probably be different
from Andrew's language, though some similarities would still
crop up (e.g., it seems to be likely that intervocalic stops
would undergo some kind of lenition, as that has happened both
in the British Celtic and the Western Romance languages).
> > More generally, the naturalness of a hypothetical
> > language could similarly be subjected to reasoned
> > academic debate and yield an emerging consensus.
>
> Exactly - debate and consensus at each stage.
>
> [snip]
>
> > It must have an objectively assassable way --
> > 'measurable' in a broad sense.
>
> Yes, at each stage one could argue that the group would be
> looking at objective criteria and then by debate, argument
> etc arrive at a consensus that by some measure or other is
> considered the most likely. But the objective criteria
> would be imperfect or fuzzy data.
Sure. Such a method would be more "objective" than Andrew's
artistic creation, even if there still would not be any way
to actually *measure* the "degree of plausibility" of the
resulting language.
> >> You can't have such a yardstick when the goal itself
> >> is not strictly well-defined. That doesn't mean that
> >> you can't have a conlang with fuzzy goals, just that
> >> with such a conlang the only way to decide whether it
> >> achieves its goals or not will be personal opinion,
> >> which by definition moves the conlang in the artlang
> >> group.
> >
> > I agree with this, of course. My point is that NRB, even
> > tho it would look like a highly naturalistic conlang,
It would certainly be highly naturalistic if the group did
their thing well! An unnaturalistic NRB would be a failure
as it would certainly not be the most likely outcome of the
alternative history.
> > would be an engelang because its goals would allow
> > candidate solutions to be objectively assessed and
> > different people's solutions would tend to converge.
>
> Would they? I wonder.
So do I. There are many ways one could come up with something
"plausible" here. One way would be to model the changes that
the language underwent after the changes that British Celtic
underwent in our world (that's similar to Andrew's approach);
another would be to look at the isogloss patterns found in
the actual Romance languages and extrapolate them to come up
with what a Romance language would have looked like that lies
even farther north than Norman French. Both would not seem
implausible, but they would certainly lead to very different
languages!
> > Faced with a candidate design for NRB, appropriate
> > responses would be not "Ooh I like that" or "De gustibus
> > non est disputandum", but would be an objective
> > assessment of it in the light of our knowledge of
> > synchronic and diachronic linguistics and British
> > history, and multiple assessors' views would tend to
> > converge, and would tend to converge on favouring an
> > ever smaller set of candidate designs.
>
> Maybe - but while disputes would not be about aesthetics,
> there would be disputes about the likelihood of different
> solutions and all it would need would be two strong-willed
> people, each holding that his/her objective assessment more
> closely meets the objective criteria (and that is not at all
> unlikely when dealing with imperfect data) for the thing to
> fall apart.
Yep. And the disputes would be much more energetic because they
would be about "truth" and not just about "beauty"!
> But even assuming this group succeeded, what you are
> envisaging is something very different from Brithenig. This
> is "engineering" by committee which evaluates each stage
> and, hopefully, reaches a consensus before moving on.
>
> I agree this does not fit the mould of artlang. On the
> other hand, I find it difficult to imagine a group spending
> a lot of time (and it would need to be) working like this to
> derive what the group considers to be the most likely NRB.
>
> If any "might be" conlang were to be developed in this way
> then I may concede that it has been engineered. But AFAIK
> this has never happened.
I know of no such example, either. Yet, if a group of academic
linguists would indeed embark on such a research project (which
seems unlikely now, as so many people in the academic community,
especially those who decide how much money is spent on which
projects, are quite obsessed with applicability), the outcome
would be an engelang - a naturalistic engelang, even!
> Meanwhile, I'll leave Brithenig on my Glossopoeia page as an
> _artlang_ "firmly placed on earth but in a different
> timeline from our own."
> http://www.carolandray.plus.com/Glosso/Glossopoeia.html#modern_artlangs
[link corrected]
Yes. It is an artlang.
--
... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
"Bêsel asa Éam, a Éam atha cvanthal a cvanth atha Éamal." - SiM 1:1
Messages in this topic (29)
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