Láadan

[trochee]

Years ago, I first read Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin (I have the crappy trade paperback version with the goofy-looking lizardy alien on the cover). If you haven't read them, it's enough to know that one key point in the novels is an attempt by women linguists to create a deliberately subversive language called Láadan. (My "Dirty Lingoe" appellation here was taken from those books, so they clearly left a mark.)

In the process of playing with KDict on my new laptop, I discovered that the Easton Bible Dictionary has some interesting notes, which I excerpt here (emphasis mine):

[A] very small number of topic references [...] were unable to be resolved. These topics are:

  Laadan, Land Laws, Vashni.

These topics are not listed in the printed edition and it is not apparent what [Mr. Easton] intended.

"Hello," I thought. "How interesting that Laadan should show up in this 1897 Bible dictionary -- without reference. Let me Google on this."


Turns out Láadan has a lot on the web. It's in Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary as meaning "for pleasure; devouring; judgment" (KDict lists it there too). I have to wonder whether Elgin intended this nice resonance. Of course, her books themselves have encouraged an online following: Láadan is listed as a constructed language on Lojban's constructed language page, for example.

In the process of snooping around further, I discovered that Elgin has all sorts of interesting linguistic writing on the web. Most fun (for language geeks like me) is a newsletter called Linguistics & Science Fiction. I'm strongly tempted to subscribe -- she's got a sort of anti-pretentious practical approach to linguistics that's very refreshing, even if her linguistic suggestions are occasionally dubious (this is from a review of an Eleanor Arnason linguistics fairytale):

[it] would also serve to start a riot at linguistics conferences, if you had somebody there charismatic enough to convince Their Linguistnesses to play. There'd be the linguists who say all adjectives are verbs, and the linguists who consider verbs superior to nouns, and the linguists saying Arnason left out the conjunctions, and there'd be me (My Linguistness, yes) saying that all adverbs are either nominals or verbs...

She also includes gems like this one:

The King James, which no parent will demand be removed from a library shelf, contains the most astonishing things. For example, did you know that in the King James Bible a common way of expressing the meaning "male human being" is with the sequence, "one who pisseth against a wall"? Pisseth, yes. Over and over again, Gentle Reader.

She's evidently something of a cut-up.


One last note: there's a whole set of interesting discussion questions about the Native Tongue novels. I wonder if there's anybody reading this who would be interested in an online discussion.

Comments

Láadan and all

[namo-mandos.livejournal.com]

I've read her Ozark trilogy and the first of the Native Tongue books. I like gender dystopias, but sometimes I get tired of the hit-you-over-the-head obviousness of some author's take on gender conflict that people like Elgin and Tepper and Charnas and (to be fair) Brin tend to use.

Problem is, such approaches tend to essentialize the conflict to such an extent it seems almost as if any way out is a "defeat" for one side or another--it makes gender into a zero-sum game. And it is such a faux pas in feminist thought in general to essentialize things to that extent.

I, for one, am not opposed to essentialism where some rational connection can really be established--and I think some can for sex and gender. But a lot of gender-dystopic SF tends to dwell on the "female/male mind." Which in itself is not a scientific concept.

This provides a good segue into the issue of Láadan. From the discussion questions:

5. In addition to being a science fiction trilogy, the three books are also a thought-experiment. They were used to "release" the Láadan language into the real world outside the novels, to observe what happened to it, and to test the data against the hypotheses the novel was exploring. The author gave the experiment an arbitrary ten-year limit, which is why she waited until 1994 to bring out the third book. The experiment had run its ten-year course in the real world, and the author was able to say with confidence that one of the hypotheses [the hypothesis that women who were given a language designed to express their perceptions would either welcome and support it or would propose an alternative such language of their own] had been proved false. What is your opinion about this experiment? How do you feel about an author using novels for such a purpose? Is it different from the Klingon language project that developed out of the Star Trek series, which was welcomed and supported so enthusiastically that there is a Klingon institute and journal supported by a university? Does the fact that the author didn’t warn readers about the experiment (which would of course have made it invalid) create ethical problems?

The claim being made is that women's perceptions of the world are inadequately expressed in languages that appear in patriarchal (read: almost every) society; but the only way to justify the necessity of starting a completely new language in itself is also to claim that the grammar (syntax and morphology, primarily) of every language is likewise also inadequate. In some cases, like French (where the default gender in grammar is masculine) this is true; but it is also true that where gender is grammaticalized, the issue of morphology is not politicized even by feminists in that society, probably due to the reduction in markedness of the feature. For instance, I am told that in Romance languages in general, concern over grammatical gender is far less than the attention we pay in anglophone society to gender-neutral speech. So based on this sketchy empirical observation, it seems that the very need for a new grammar is not really that well-founded, except in altering existing grammars where gender is only partially grammaticalized and highly marked (like English).

But what appears to be lacking is concepts to explain women's experience, and I think there is a some justification for this claim. And if this is so, then it seems to me that the problem is essentially a lexical one. And so the solution is to find some way to expand the lexicon to include these aspects so that all members of society are capable of absorbing these concepts. I have thoughts on this too, but I've written quite a bit so I'll leave it at that.