Talk:Artistic language

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[edit] Moved from Talk:Fictional language

I thought the alien languages used in the Star Wars movies were samples of obscure, real-world languages. Anybody know?

I have the vague recollection from a long-ago seem making-of documentary that (at least in the first 3 movies) they were jumbled together; a word from this language, a word from that language. Nothing real systematic. --Brion 08:09 Oct 4, 2002 (UTC)
ISTR reading that in the first Star wars, in the cantina scene where the alien is talking to Han Solo, he's speaking Quechua; which startled a number of viewers when it was shown in South America -- Malcolm Farmer 08:39 Oct 4, 2002 (UTC)
Yes, it was Quechua: http://www.starwars.com/databank/character/greedo/bts.html -- Malcolm Farmer 08:49 Oct 4, 2002 (UTC)
Anyone know whether the words match the subtitles or were selected purely for sound? --Brion 08:52 Oct 4, 2002 (UTC)

I am interested in starting an article on the linguistics of science-fiction- particularly pertaining to the predicted mutations of the english language. Several works of fiction set in the future make predictions about the changing usage of the English language. Obvious examples are the Newspeak in 1984 (novel) and the repressed language of Brave New World. More contemporary examples would be the slang in the futuristic cartoons Batman Beyond and Futurama (animated series). Does anyone know if an article to this effect already exists? I was thinking of titling it Linguistics in science fiction. Any suggestions? - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 21:44, Mar 11, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] The author of Tokana

"* Tokana, by Matthew Pearson"

If my memory serves me right, Prof. Pearson's first name is Matthias or Mattias. Can anyone verify the correct first name of Matt Pearson?

According to his own home page, people/grads/pearson/tokindex.html, it's "Matthew". --Jim Henry | Talk 16:43, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
Here. I found a site where his name appears as Mattias:
http://www.langmaker.com/db/alp_awota.htm Wiwaxia 05:28, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
Mattias Persson is a different person than Matthew Pearson. Persson is also a conlanger but seems to be more interested in devising scripts than languages. Persson is Swedish, Pearson American. --Jim Henry | Talk 15:50, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Nonexistent article links

I think we should probably change a bunch of the links to nonexistent articles to be external links instead. Most of the amateur artlangs listed here do not deserve separate articles. --Jim Henry | Talk 16:51, 6 May 2005 (UTC)

Well, I've been thinking of starting an article for Teonaht soon (or maybe someone else will start it). If they start this or any of the other articles, I'd hate to have it not linked. Besides, we've done a good job at monitoring the list to keep only the familiar amateur artlang names listed. There have been a few reversions of people adding conlangs of the gets-only-three-Google-hits type to that page. Wiwaxia 05:32, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
I've started an article for Teonaht, as well as one for Kélen and one for Lingua Ignota. Please take a look at them and see if you have anything to add. Pete Bleackley --132.185.132.12 10:04, 31 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] "Personal languages"?

The list of "Personal languages" given does not agree well, it seems to me, with the definition of "personal language" given earlier in the article. Most of them are fictional languages, associated with constructed worlds even if not used in professionally published fiction. The only ones in the list I know of that don't have a fictional or micronational culture behind them are Toki Pona and Aingeljã -- and Taneraic, which I just added. Of course the creators of some of the fictional languages listed may use them extensively for private purposes as well; I'm fairly sure Sally Caves does so with Teonaht. But maybe we should split this list up into "Non-professional fictional languages" and "Personal languages", the latter being a much shorter list. --Jim Henry | Talk 11:05, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

... and then hear that the whole section of "non-professional fictional languages" is nonnotable hobbyism and therefore needs to be deleted? No, thanks!
I've always found the term fictional languages troublesome: it is used in the meaning "language used in a work of fiction" and "non-existing language" simultaneously. For what it is worth, in the Dutch wikipedia I used the following subdivision:
  • Artistic languages
    • Fantasy languages: languages of fictional worlds and countries.
    • Alternative languages: same as here. E.g. Brithenig, Wenedyk
    • Micronational languages: same as here. E.g. Talossan
    • Personal languages: languages created for their own sake. No attached conworld. E.g. Toki Pona, Aingeljã
    • Stealth languages
    • Parody languages (= jokelangs). E.g. DiLingo
  • Internationale auxiliary languages
  • Logical languages. Perhaps better: engineerd languages
  • Fictional languages: languages used in books and other professional media that consist of little more than a few fragments. Examples: Black Speech, Pravic, Syldavian, Parseltongue
  • Reconstructed languages: Proto-Indo-European and the like
  • Language games: Pig Latin etc.
  • Computer languages
In other words, the difference between fantasy languages and fictional languages is a very subtle one, but mostly a matter of size. You can hardly call Klingon a fictional language: there is a complete grammar, a dictionary, and even a number of people who speak it. The languages in question cannot be considered real languages: they consist of little more than their own names and perhaps a few examples. They owe their significants solely to the significance of the medium they're in.
The solution above could also solve the problem of "personal languages": this group includes only languages that do nót have a conculture attached to them and that are primarily used for diaries and the like.
--IJzeren Jan 13:24, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
OK, that division makes sense. The only problem I have with it is that "fantasy languages" may seem to exclude languages designed for science-fictional worlds, or worlds that are like our own except for one extra country (like Fyksian or Islandian). Also, your use of the term "fictional language" to describe languages that exist only as fragments in a work of narrative fiction makes sense in itself, but doesn't agree with the way I've often seen the term used. Wikipedia should not be an arbiter of terminology, but a registrant of existing terminology (and of existing lack of agreement about terminology). Maybe this classificational debate should be taken to the Conlang Wikicity? --Jim Henry | Talk 16:02, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
The term "fantasy" in this context should not be confused with the genre "fantasy" (elves, wizards, dragons etc.). In Dutch this isn't a problem because the former is called "fantasie-" (stress on the last syllable) and the latter "fantasy" (pron. like in English).
Furthermore, I agree with your point about fictional languages. Sure, WP should not be an arbiter in terminology. What it should do is to registrate all the different usages of the term "fictional". But when it comes to categorising conlangs it will have to make a choice: the current chaos is far from desirable.
--IJzeren Jan 18:32, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
Unfortunately "fantasy" has taken on a more restricted meaning in English lately. The terminology might work in Dutch, but it would probably be out of place in English, at least in the English Wikipedia, since I don't recall ever seeing the term before.
The article could say something like "The term fictional language is used by some to mean..... and by others to mean ..... In this article, we will use it in the first sense." --Jim Henry | Talk 20:00, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
Exactly! And as for the fantasy issue: it's not much of a problem. Since the main criterion between my Dutch fictional languages and fantasy languages is size and completeness, it's easy to merge the two. In that case Quenya, Klingon, Verdurian, Teonaht, Syldavian and Pravic are all examples of fictional languages. But remember that in this situation the fictional languages are a subgroup of the artistic languages! --IJzeren Jan 06:07, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Tolkien

Jan, I see you have removed Tolkien from the "personal languages" section. This really shows the weakness of the literary vs. personal distinction. Surely, Tolkiens languages were prevalently 'personal' up to 1954, with only a few names published in poems. With the Lord of the Rings, Quenya and Sindarin clearly became 'literary'. But does that mean they lost their status of "personal"? And what about the remaining languages, such as Adunaic, that were never published? Clearly, these were fully "personal" languages. Just because your son publishes studies of your personal languages after you die doesn't really make them "literary". Anyway, as I see it, purely personal languages have no place here anyway, since they will lack notability, so my feeling is to rearrange the categories, scrapping the list of "personal" languages altogether. dab (ᛏ) 19:39, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Well, let me put first that I think the whole professional ~ non-professional/personal distinction is moot. But since we force ourselves to make it, we better cope with it.
As for listing Tolkien's languages under "professional", you are of course right that Tolkien made his stuff for personal reasons and only later decided to incorporate it in his books. Look at the definition given in the article: "Professional fictional languages are used for a book, movie, ..."; the phrasing "are used" explicitly includes conlangs that started out as personal languages but then were included in a book or whatever.
If Adûnaic and similar projects of Tolkien's were listed separately, then they would undoubtedly belong to the Personal languages. But we list the Languages of Middle-earth as a whole, and since nobody will deny that Quenya and Sindarin are a lot more significant than Adûnaic and Animalic, listing them under "Professional" seemed a logical choice to me.
For the rest, I disagree with your remark that purely personal languages lack notability and therefore have no place here. Look at the list: of these, I'd say that the notability of at least Teonaht, Toki Pona and Verdurian are beyond any doubt, and I personally believe the same thing goes for the others listed there, too. But then, let's first see what you mean by "purely".
--IJzeren Jan 06:20, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
the whole professional ~ non-professional/personal distinction is moot.
precisely my point, I am saying, let us drop it then. dab (ᛏ) 08:21, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Okay, but then we'll have to define clear what is what first. If we go by my own definition (see above), then personal languages would be languages without an attached conculture. In the current list that would be Aingeljã, Tokana and Toki Pona. I'm not sure about K and Taneraic. Mind, the fact that they don't have a culture attached to them does not mean that they are necessarily insignificant.
The languages with a conculture (Arovën, Kélen, Teonaht and Verdurian) would then be moved to the fictional languages, right? That would be fine with me, but there is one problem: as far as I know, these languages do not play a role in a book, a movie or a game. They should therefore be a new category within the fictional languages anyway (amateur fictional languages, internet-based fictional languages, etc.). That would make the whole operation pretty pointless, because then again we end up with a professional/non-professional distinction. Now that I think of it, that's the situation we used to have here until somebody rearranged everything! --IJzeren Jan 12:42, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Tokana does have an associated conculture: "Like all natural languages, Tokana exists within a cultural and historical context - albeit a somewhat sketchy one." [1]
I think the distinction between languages designed for a fictional culture, and languages designed for personal use by the creator, is a useful one. I support keeping the "Personal language" section but fewer things need to be listed there; we need separate lists of conculture-associated languages used in professionally published fiction and those that have not been so used, as IJzeren Jan suggests. K and Taneraic were definitely designed for personal use, as is Carlos's Chleweyish and my own gjâ-zym-byn.
Toki Pona is an interesting case. It seems to have started as a personal language, but it's been adopted by so many other people who aren't friends of the creator that I hestitate to go on listing it in that category. Yet the other categories here don't fit it.
I don't think we need to set the same notability bar for mentioning an artlang in this article's list as we do for creating a separate article about it. K for instance is probably not notable or verifiable enough for its own article, but I would support continuing to list it here, along with the link to the interview describing it. Taneraic is borderline; it certainly deserves a mention here, but I'm not sure if it deserves its own article. I don't think gjâ-zym-byn deserves an article, but if someone else adds it to the personal languages section I wouldn't remove it (or object if a third person removes it); ditto with Chleweyish. --Jim Henry | Talk 12:29, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
"professional" vs. "unprofessional" is not an useful distinction, nor is the question whether a "conculture" is attached: Hardly anybody is a language maker by profession. Tolkien's languages would qualify as "unprofessional", since by profession he was a scholar of Old English. My suggestion is to list by medium of dissemination, (a) literature, (b) movies and games, (c) just over internet communities (or simply lump b and c under 'other media', as it is done at present). Either that, or we have to drop categorization altogether, and simply list alphabetically. Note that "literary" languages are often less developed than your average 'aficionado' project: Herge's Syldavian only needed a few sentences to create some atmosphere, it did not have the point of being developed into a full grammar. dab (ᛏ) 12:45, 22 August 2005 (UTC)
How are we then to explain the very important difference between constructed languages, that are meant to be languages, and fictional languages, that are meant to give flavor to fiction? Fictional languages that consist of nothing more than "In (fictional place) Foo they speak (fictional language) Fooian." are a very different beast from "Klingons speak Klingon, and you can buy the dictionary, grammar and a treatise on Klingon dialects at (bookstore) Bar." That conlangers often discuss and analyse the few if any traces of Fooian as if it was a full language certainly complicates matters. --Kaleissin 14:34:54, 2005-08-22 (UTC)

[edit] Another try at a classification scheme

It seems there are several orthogonal categories we could apply, and there's disagreement about which should be primary. For instance, we can classify languages by:

  1. how complete they are
  2. whether there is an associated conculture or not
  3. whether they have been used in professionally published fiction/media

I agree with dab that "professional" could be misleading. It could mean "created by a professional linguist" or "used in professionally published fiction/media" or "created by someone who got paid to do so". As far as I know Klingon is the only language that would fit all three of those definitions; many "amateur" or "personal" languages were created by professional linguists, and most languages used in novels, movies, etc. were not created by professional linguists.

If we look at the ways those three classificational criteria combine, there are at least eight types (considering completeness as just a binary criterion: complete/sketchy). We can rule out some of those types (sketchy, no conculture, not used in fiction/media; or, has conculture but not complete nor used in fiction) as being inherently non-notable. That leaves us six types:

  1. complete, with conculture, used in fiction (Quenya etc; IJzeren Jan's fantasy languages)
  2. complete, with conculture, not used in fiction (Verdurian etc.; IJzeren Jan's amateur fantasy languages)
  3. complete, without conculture, not used in fiction (Taneraic etc; personal languages strictly so called)
  4. complete, without conculture, used in fiction
  5. sketchy, without conculture, used in fiction — are there any languages of these two types, and if so are they notable? It seems that any conlang used in fiction will have a conculture associated with it, won't it?
  6. sketchy, with conculture, used in fiction (Pravic, Syldavian, Marain, etc; IJzeren Jan's fictional languages)

As I noted above, I'm not quite satisfied with IJzeren Jan's names for the categories, but I'm not sure what other names to use yet. --Jim Henry | Talk 14:26, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

If, by published, you mean professionally published, I'd call them
  1. Professional fictional languages
  2. Fictional languages (however, this isn't how Wikipedia has used the term)
  3. Personal languages (this one's unambiguous)
  4. Fictional stealth languages (presumably the only fictional use of a conlang without an associated conculture would be as a stealthlang)
  5. Fictional stealth language sketch
  6. Sketch language. This would also include the two types that aren't of interest. PeteBleackley 08:53, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Voting on conlang policy starts

Voting has started on the conlang notability/verifiablity criteria at Wikipedia:Conlangs/Votes. --Jim Henry | Talk 15:05, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Pmurray bigpond.com 03:53, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

What's that language that Anton LaVey usues in "The Satanic Bible"? That one might also rate amention in this article.

The language used in Church of Satan rituals, and the Satanic Bible is Enochian, which, ironicaly is often called an Angelic/Divine language. The Church of Satan website has a pronounciantion guide in their "Theory/Practice section.151.203.182.69 04:40, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Terminology: "artistic language" vs "artlang"

Nobody uses the phrase "artistic language" - and it's too close to "autistic language"! Stop messing with established terminology and get back to what the general public understands. This sort of thing gets sneeringly called "original research" in Wikipedia. And besides, the French would tell you that their actuel language is inspected by 40 geniuses a year for preservation as a world artistic heritage site, mind you! --129.10.14.241 22:40, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

So, what do you propose, then? —IJzeren Jan Uszkiełtu? 10:53, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
Actually, in the conlang community the phrase "artistic language" seems to be much less common than its abbreviation "artlang". "artlang" may be too elliptical or cryptic for the title of an article in Wikipedia, but the article should make clear that "artlang" is the actual term used and "artistic language" is rarely used in this sense. In the first 3 pages of Google hits for the phrase (excluding Wikipedia mirrors) I found only one page that used the term w.r.t. artistic constructed languages; [2] ... most the others referred to conventions of visual art, a handful to music or literature.
--Jim Henry 14:57, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
User:Dbachmann just made a series of edits replacing "artlang" with "artistic language" in almost every use in the article. As noted above, "artlang" is a term in frequent use in the constructed language community, and "artistic language", of which is is supposedly an abbreviation, is hardly ever used except in Wikipedia --- web searches for "artistic language" turn up hardly any references to artlangs. --Jim Henry 17:45, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pig Latin as "jokelang" or "language game"?

What is the reasoning for moving Pig Latin from the "language game" section to the "Jokelangs" section? As a relex of English based on a regular mutation rule, it seems to fit every criteria of a language game as defined in said section, and has nothing much in common with Oou, Europanto etc. --Jim Henry 22:20, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Langmaker.com link

Langmaker.com is blacklisted? Something's gotta be done about that. Langmaker is one of the oldest and most important conlanging sites on the web! PubliusFL 18:49, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Is it really blacklisted? Where does one find out such information? J. Smith has been doing a lot of langmaker.com linkbreaking. I put something on his talk page. I believe he is in error.

Epigraphist 23:51, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Apparently it is. here is the blacklist (list of domains that may not be used in URLs on any Wikimedia Foundation projects, and here is the section of the talk page where the addition of langmaker.com was discussed. Looks like a couple of people got mad because anonymous editors were adding links to the langmaker articles for particular conlangs. PubliusFL 00:02, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
Hi. J. Smith was breaking the links not out of spite but simply to make the pages editable. The links had already been blacklisted when he started. Once a page has a blacklisted link, the MediaWiki software will not allow saving any new edits until the offending link is gone.We had a mini-rush 24 hours ago when we suddenly learned that we 150+ freshly blacklisted links on the English Wikipedia and would soon have dozens of editors locked out of articles. There are two relevant discussions:
Your inputs would be helpful to our WikiProject Spam discussion. --A. B. (talk) 04:04, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
(PS I'm not an admin or a decisionmaker in all of this -- just passing along the information) --A. B. (talk) 04:04, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the information. Looks to me like the cure is worse than the disease in this case! PubliusFL 06:40, 16 February 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for clearing this up for us. Look's like J. Smith's been up to some regular do-right.Epigraphist 22:51, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] fictional languages

Just another example of Wikipedia attempting to prescribe usage? I've always seen them referred to as conlangs. The word construct "fictional languages", means just that, a language that is fictional, eg. the language Sanomi was sung in. A language for a fictional world has always been called a conlang. +Hexagon1 (t) 02:54, 22 January 2008 (UTC)