Con-cultures and con-languages

adapted from a 17 Jul 1997 post by Roger Espel Llima

> On Thu, 17 Jul 1997, Peter Clark wrote:
> > Diverging a bit off Mia's post (but not too far), I was wondering> > what people's opinions are on a certain question that has been troubling
> > me for a while. Namely, what do you all think of creating cultures for
> > your languages? I understand the reasons for it, but at the same time, I
> > have a very strong resistance to creating a "culture." I would much rather
> > create something that reflected me, and only me. I really can't explain
> > it, but I just feel very hesitant about creating a culture that would
> > match the language. Opinions?

I've been thinking of this for my conlang too (Zoinx). It feels nice to be creating a culture, picking elements and making it the way you like, but I can see two pitfalls:

1) for quite a few conlangs I've read descriptions of, which had cultural information, the descriptions were all in the vein of "this is spoken by the race [weirdname] on planet [stuff]; they look like [this] and their history is [blah blah blah]". not to disparage those efforts, it felt a bit like poor man's science fiction.

2) it must be quite hard to construct a whole believable culture w/o biasing it with your own pet choices to the point where it's more about you than a culture of its own. especially if you're one of these who (like me) get quite personally involved in their conlang(s), rather than being objective about them.

so I decided on a simple rule... I won't make up a culture and then describe it explicitly, but will refer to it only through the choice of words and definitions, and when needed to explain a point of the language. and I won't try too hard to avoid my personal biases and ideas of what kind of culture I would like best to live in (which doesn't mean I'll make it like that in every aspect, of course).


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Last updated: 19 December, 1997