In the Land of Invented Languages

by Arika Okrent

  In his original Scientific American article, Brown set himself apart from the mad language inventors, with their Utopian missions and blindly confident claims, by presenting himself as the cool, impartial scientist. Clearly, he was anything but cool and impartial.

  In the final few pages of the final chapter of his final book on Loglan, the revised grammar he published in 1989, we get a brief, illuminating glimpse of his unguarded ambitions when he launches into a breathless description of what might happen if the experiments showed that Loglan did indeed have a “mind-expanding, thought-facilitating” effect:

  Wouldn’t the entire experimental program, in fact, now be seen as a successful assessment of a proposed new educational experience, one that was available to everyone? It might even be seen as a treatment of a disease we didn’t know we had! LLL, the disease of “logical language limitation,” or UNM of “unnecessarily narrowed minds” … And wouldn’t Loglan itself then be seen as the gentle new cure for that ancient human malady? … An antidote for the bigotry with which even “civilized people” tend to view their neighbors in the global village? … This is what is very likely to happen given what the journalists will call a “positive” outcome of our Whorfian experiment … Backed up by such a result, Loglan would probably be seen as ideal in the role of that international auxiliary, for example: the first language to be taught to the world’s school children, the one slated to become everybody’s second tongue … our engineered new second-language would be seen as the mind-expander, the instrument of thought, reason, invention, and exposition … and perhaps also the medium of intercultural mediation, a culture-spanning bridge to a more tolerant and peaceful world.

  You can almost see the film reel unrolling behind his starry eyes—the international news conferences, the front-page headlines, the Nobel Prize ceremony. His hopes for Loglan, and for himself, were much grander than he let on. Beneath the detached scientific demeanor lay the passionate soul of a language inventor.

  “When he lost the case, Jim couldn’t believe it,” his widow, Evelyn Anderson, told me. “Both he and his lawyer thought they had it for sure. But within a few months he wasn’t talking about it anymore. He just moved on.” He put his energy into other projects—a paper on his theory of the origin of language, a book about his Utopian economic plan, called The Job Market of the Future. He continued to work with a small group of loyal Loglanists, one of whom told me he thought “the split did soften his attitude toward suggestions and criticism from those who stuck with him.”

  Brown was seventy-one when he lost the case and had been working on Loglan for over thirty years. It hadn’t brought him money or fame, but it did yield some happiness points. “He considered it pure joy when he was working on it,” Ms. Anderson told me. “Right until the end he was working out something that he found totally fascinating, and he was not put off by the fact that it had not achieved what he had …” She paused for a moment, then continued. “He went to his death thinking it was the greatest thing that he had published.”

  Though Brown would never publicly make peace with or accept Lojban, one of the friends who stuck with him in the split told me that “he acknowledged privately that he considered Lojban to be one of his intellectual children, albeit an illegitimate child, that he was still pleased to see succeeding.” Perhaps one day, he thought, after he was gone, the rift would be repaired. But even then, it would still have to be on his terms—they were written into his will. The institute could only accept rapprochement if Bob LeChevalier was no longer involved.

  Brown died of a heart attack in 2000 while on a cruise off the coast of the southernmost tip of Argentina, and he was buried there. For about a week after that there was some discussion of reunification on the Lojban message boards—how the vocabularies might merge and so forth—but it faded away quickly. All the action was in Lojban anyway. And that’s where it stayed.

  Meaning Quicksand

  To all the language curmudgeons out there who insist that people ought to speak more logically, I say, be careful what you wish for. You go on about the “logical” mismatch between “everyone” and “their” in perfectly normal-sounding sentences like “Everyone clapped their hands.” You argue that phrases like “very unique” and “sufficiently enough” don’t make logical sense. You harp on “hopefully” and “literally” and “the reason is because,” all the while calling logic to your side to defend your righteous anger.

  Before you judge me as some kind of “anything goes” language heathen, let me just say that I’m not against usage standards. I don’t violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don’t wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful person. There are social conventions for the way we do lots of things, and it is to everyone’s benefit to be familiar with them. But logic ain’t got nothin' to do with it.

  And oh, how grateful I am. Do you know how good we have it, how much easier our speaking lives are made by the fact that language and logic part ways? Consider the word “and.” Why, you barely have to know what you mean when you say it! When you say you “like ham and eggs,” do you have to specify whether you like each of those things as evaluated on its own merits separately or whether you like them served together as an entrée? No. You just lazily throw out your “and” and let context do the rest of the work for you. When you say you “woke up and ate breakfast,” do you mean that you woke up first and then ate breakfast? Or did you do the two things simultaneously? Or maybe your breakfast was asleep, so you woke it up and then ate it. Pshaw, you say. You know what I mean. Perhaps I do, says the Lojbanist. Perhaps I don’t.

  There are many ways to say “and” in Lojban. If you use the word .e in the following sentence (the stands for a slight pause):

  la djan.e la alis. pu bevri le pipno “John and Alice carried the piano.”

  you assert two propositions: “John carried the piano” and “Alice carried the piano.” Maybe they took turns. Maybe one of them did it in 1963 and the other one did it yesterday. But this sentence does not apply to the situation where John and Alice carried the piano together. For that you would use joi:

  la djan. joi la alis. pu bevri le pipno “John and Alice (as mass entity) carried the piano.”

  You would be wrong to use joi, however, if you wanted to say, “John and Alice are friends.” For that situation you must use jo’u:

  la djan. jo’u la alis. pendo “John and Alice (considered jointly) are friends.”

  If you used joi here, you would have said John and Alice massed together form some kind of friend entity. If you used e, you would have said that John is a friend (of someone) and Alice is a friend (of someone), and maybe they don’t even know each other.

  There are at least twenty ways to say “and” in Lojban. But that’s nothing compared with what happens when you get into “or” and “if.” Even if you master the many, many rules pertaining to those little words, you’ve still barely begun to scratch the surface of the tip of the iceberg that is Lojban.

  Frankly, the thought of trying to capture Lojban in a nutshell for you—something I have tried to do with the languages I’ve discussed in previous chapters—fills me with despair. There is just so much. The language is specified to within an inch of its life. The reference grammar comes to over six hundred pages. This doesn’t even include a dictionary.

  I read the whole thing—I swear I did. And I’ll tell you, not only did I still not speak Lojban, but I started to lose my ability to comprehend English.

  “How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken light-bulb?” goes the old Lojban joke. “Two: one to decide what to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulb emits broken light.” The further I waded into Lojban, the more everything I heard seemed to be filtered through the sensibilities of a bratty, literal-minded eight-year-old—“You love birthday cake? Well, why don’t you marry it?” “Can you use the bathroom? I don’t know, can you?”—with the difference that while the eight-yea
r-old knows what you really mean, my lapses of understanding were genuine. One day during my weeklong immersion in the Lojban grammar, I was watching an Elmo video with my son when a friendly puppet character popped up to ask, “What are the two numbers that come after the number 6?” I had no idea what this puppet was getting at. “What the hell does she mean?” I wondered. “There are an infinite number of numbers that come after the number 6.” I honestly did not know what the answer was supposed to be until the video told me (it’s 7 and 8, by the way).

  Was this some kind of Whorfian effect? Well, no. It was more of a Freudian effect—like when you read a little Freud and suddenly everything starts to look like a penis. If someone keeps calling your attention to hidden meanings, or distinctions in meanings, you may start to see them. Your view of the world can be shaped by lots of things, but the Whorfian hypothesis wants only to know which parts are shaped by the language you speak. And I did not speak Lojban. In fact, after reading the grammar, I was pretty sure it was impossible for anyone to speak it.

  But people do speak it. Well, they sort of do. I saw this for myself when I attended Logfest (jbonunsla in Lojban), a gathering of about twelve computer guys (plus Nora) that took place in 2006. Bob and Nora had stopped hosting Logfest at their home a few years before, not because they were unwilling, but because, as Bob told me, “I think the newer members wanted something a little more formal than the accommodations we provided. They wanted to stay in a hotel, eat at restaurants, more of an official conference-type thing.” The Logfest I attended was held at Phil-con, “the [Philadelphia] region’s premiere conference of Science Fiction and Fantasy.” We got bumped out of one and then another room we had been promised when it turned out that an author signing or panel discussion had already been scheduled for that space, and so we ended up crowded around a coffee table in the eighth-floor, end-of-hall suite that a few of the participants were sharing. This made it hard for interested newcomers to drop in and hear the presentations designed to entice them into joining the cause, so talks like “What Is Lojban?” and “Introductory Lojban Class” ended up being preached to the choir.

  I was scheduled to give a talk on the history of invented languages (when I registered, the organizer discovered through my Web page that I was writing a book and invited me to give a presentation about it). I came armed with my own Lojban translation of Borges’s quotation about the futility of classifying the universe, the one I had translated into Wilkins’s language: “It is clear that there is no classification of the universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is.” Studying Lojban had given me the same unsettling feeling that I had experienced deep within the thickets of Wilkins’s tables—the sensation of being sucked into meaning quicksand, where the struggle for greater precision was not a lunge toward solid ground but a hopeless kicking and flailing that only pulled me in deeper.

  But in Lojban it was worse. Not only did I have to pin down which translation I should use for content words like “clear,” “arbitrary,” and “reason” (is the best I can do for “arbitrary” really cunso—“x is random/fortuitous/unpredictable under conditions y, with probability distribution z”?); I also had to grapple with little function words like “the,” “and,” “of,” and “no”—words for which Wilkins had supplied straightforward substitutes.

  Then I had to deal with syntax. Until Loglan, invented languages had never been very explicit about how sentences should be put together. In philosophical languages like Wilkins’s, or symbol languages like Blissymbolics, once you had done the hard work of finding the appropriate concept words, you just arranged them in an English-Latin-type hybrid grammar. There was never a well-defined “correct” syntax for these languages. Esperanto developed a better-defined standard of proper sentence structure, but it came naturally through usage, and not because the inventor laid down the rules from the beginning. You don’t learn the rules of Esperanto; you intuit them from examples. When speaking Esperanto, I could draw on my general familiarity with European languages and wing it pretty successfully.

  There is no winging it in Lojban. The language has an exhaustively defined syntax, and it is completely unambiguous. One must clearly specify the structure of the sentence as a whole, using various markers that serve, in effect, as spoken parentheses. There can be no confusion, for example, between an “ancient (history teacher)” and an “(ancient history) teacher” in Lojban. When you say “I saw the man with the binoculars” in Lojban, you can leave no doubt as to whether you had the binoculars or the man did. Lojban sentences have only one structural parse.

  So you have to make sure it’s the one you really want. Composing a sentence in Lojban is like writing a line of computer code. Choose the wrong function, drop a variable, forget to close a parenthesis, and it doesn’t work. But how do you know it doesn’t work? At least when you write a computer program, you have a way to determine whether you’ve made a mistake: you hit enter, and the program doesn’t do what you wanted it to do. How do you sit down with a six-hundred-page book of grammatical rules and determine whether you’ve followed them correctly?

  Fortunately, you can visit jboski, the online Lojban-to-English translator, and at least see if your Lojban sentence parses. If you’ve made any major errors, or left out a crucial structural element, you’ll get an error message. If you managed to create a valid Lojban sentence, you will get something like this, the product of my first (after several tries) successfully parsed translation of “It is clear that there is no classification of the universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures”:

  I got a little thrill when my sentence returned this parse. It was the same thrill I would get during grad school, when, after a long night of beating my head against the keyboard trying to write a data-crunching program, a beautiful stream of output would finally pour down the screen like a light-dappled waterfall of celebratory champagne.

  But was this parse cause for celebration? I wasn’t so sure. I knew that I had composed a grammatical Lojban sentence, but I couldn’t be certain it meant what I wanted it to mean. When I presented it to the Lojbanists at Logfest, I discovered that it didn’t. I had actually said that all classifications of the universe were random and full of people who guess. Smadi means “x guesses y is true about subject z.” According to the syntax of my sentence, I was making a statement about the x argument—the guesser. What I wanted was they argument—the guess. I should have used sesmadi instead.

  I didn’t feel too bad, though. Lojbanists are always making this kind of mistake. They are always making all kinds of mistakes. I know this because on the message boards where Lojban is used, hardly a sentence goes by that is not questioned or corrected—often by the very person who wrote the sentence. In fact, the main topic of Lojban conversation is Lojban itself. When one heated exchange (in English) led a commenter to write “Go fuck yourself!” in Lojban, it turned into a lengthy discussion of why he hadn’t said what he meant to say, and what the proper Lojban expression for the sentiment might be.

  I didn’t see much live conversation at Logfest, but I did see a little. It goes very, very slowly. It’s like watching people do long division in their heads. Of course, the types of people who are attracted to Lojban are precisely the types who are good at doing long division in their heads. Almost everyone there had some kind of engineering or math background (except for one enthusiast who, being fifteen years old, couldn’t properly be said to even have a background). For dedicated Lojbanists, only part of the difficulty of speaking Lojban comes from the mental effort involved in keeping track of functions and variables. The rest of the difficulty comes from having to hyper-vigilantly guard their Lojban against the influence of English.

  The temptation is there, for example, to use the word gunka (work) in a sentence like “This phone doesn’t work.” But gunka means “x labors/works on y with goal/objective z.” It doesn’t cover the English sense of “work” meaning “to fu
nction.” It would likewise be inappropriate to use dizlo (low) to say you’re feeling low, because dizlo only means low “as compared with baseline/standard height z.” The metaphorical extension of lowness to emotions doesn’t hold in Lojban. There is a Lojban word for these kinds of mistakes—malglico (damned English!). Malglico is what happens when you let the assumptions of English creep into your Lojban.

  And this must be avoided in Lojban, because to remain valid in a test of the Whorfian hypothesis, it must remain culturally neutral. In terms of vocabulary, this means that definitions should be unclouded by connotations and metaphorical extensions that may not be shared from culture to culture. In terms of grammar, this means that it should have the resources to express the range of distinctions that languages express, including distinctions that English might not have. For example, English does not make the grammatical distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, but other languages do. In the Austronesian language Mekeo, you express possession one way if the possessed thing could potentially be transferred to someone else (e?u ngaanga: “my canoe”) and a different way if it cannot (aki-u: literally “brother-my,” so “my brother”). If it is true that the difference in the grammatical treatment of possession between English and Mekeo gives rise to some difference in worldview between the two cultures, Lojban doesn’t want to force Mekeo speakers to blur the distinction, thereby forcing them to take on the English view of possession. In Lojban you can make the distinction, but you are not required to (because that would be forcing the Mekeo worldview on English speakers). However, if the English speaker chooses to use the neutral form, he should be aware that if he introduces someone as le mi bruna (the-somehow-associated-with-me brother), he has said only that that person is a brother (maybe his own, maybe someone else’s) who has some connection with him. If he assumes he has said “my brother” in the commonly understood English sense, he is being rather malglico.