In the Land of Invented Languages

by Arika Okrent

  Lojban wants to be both everything, a language that accommodates all worldviews, and nothing, a language committed to no particular worldview. At the same time, it wants to be a specific something—a language that trains your mind in the rules of formal logic. It’s hard work keeping on top of all these goals at once.

  And somewhat futile. Not only do we “not know what thing the universe is,” but we don’t know what assumptions we make about it. We cannot see our own worldview any more than we can see our own eyes. We don’t think about the difference between alienable and inalienable possession until we chance upon a language that makes the distinction. Lojbanists have done an admirable job of incorporating these types of distinctions into the grammar when they discover them, but they can never be sure they have discovered them all.

  They are aware of this. No Lojbanist today will go so far as to claim that Lojban is free from what they call “metaphysical assumptions.” They will only say that they are doing their best to make the language as culturally neutral as they can. Lojbanists are nothing if not conscientious analyzers of their own hidden metaphysical assumptions. And when someone comes across an especially exotic type of meaning (or distinction in meaning) encoded in another language, they will all pitch in, with great excitement, to see whether it can somehow be accommodated. The size of Lojban grew rapidly, after the split, from a frenzied burst of just this type of activity. In one case inspiration came from an unlikely source: another invented language, also created for the purpose of conducting a Whorfian experiment. It was a language designed not to avoid committing to a worldview but to express one that the inventor felt no language adequately expressed: a woman’s point of view.

  To Menstruate Joyfully

  Suzette Haden Elgin, as her Web site biography states, “was born in Missouri in 1936. All sorts of things happened, and in the late 60s she found herself widowed, re-married, mother of five, and a graduate student in the Linguistics Department of the University of California San Diego.” In order to earn some extra money, she started writing science fiction, and in 1970 she published her first novel. A few years after that she finished a dissertation on Navajo syntax and then worked as a linguistics professor until 1980, when she retired and moved back to her native Ozarks.

  A year later, she was invited to speak as a guest of honor at a feminist science fiction convention. She planned to address the topic of why the fictional worlds of women writers tended to be based on the idea of matriarchy—where women are superior to men—or androgyny—where women are the same as men—but not a third alternative, where women are entirely different from men. Perhaps, as she explains in the introduction to her grammar of Láadan, the language she eventually created, it was because “the only language available to women excluded the third reality … the lack of lexical resources literally made it impossible to imagine such a reality.”

  She had recently become aware, through a book she had been asked to review, of the “feminist hypothesis that existing human languages are inadequate to express the perceptions of women,” and she began thinking about what a language that did adequately express those perceptions might look like. And if there were such a language, how might it change the people who spoke it? How might it change society?

  She wanted to explore these questions further, but wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. “A scientific experiment and a scholarly monograph would have been nice,” she wrote, “but I knew what the prospects of funding would be for an investigation of these matters.” So she took her questions to the laboratory of fiction, beginning her work on Native Tongue, a futuristic novel in which a marginalized class of women linguists create a language for themselves.

  Elgin wanted to know, as a linguist, exactly how her fictional language worked, so she set about creating it, going far beyond the rough description and smattering of vocabulary of other fictional thought-experiment languages, such as Newspeak. She put her language to the test by translating various texts into it, in the process refining and expanding it, and by the end of 1982 Láadan had a well-defined syntax and a vocabulary of over a thousand words. Elgin began to see the possibility for a real-world experiment as well. If women really did feel that existing languages were inadequate to their perceptions, what would happen when they were offered a woman’s language? Either “they would welcome and nurture it, or it would at minimum motivate them to replace it with a better women’s language of their own construction.” Láadan was released to the world when Native Tongue was published in 1984, and Elgin decided to wait ten years to see how it fared out there. She would declare the experiment a success or a failure by 1994.

  Early on, Láadan was embraced by a small group of women science fiction readers who formed the Láadan Network. One of them put together a zine of contributions from the network—letters, comments, Láadan poetry, suggestions for new words. In 1988, the Society for the Furtherance & Study of Fantasy & Science Fiction, the group that organized the WisCon convention, published a grammar and dictionary of the language that included lessons and exercises.

  Láadan establishes itself as a “woman’s language” through some rather obvious devices. It has the only language textbook I know of that gives the word for “menstruate” in Lesson 1. But the approach has a level of sophistication that far exceeds non-gendered pronouns or “womyn’s herstory”–type coinages. The language is meant to convey a female perspective in the way it carves up the world of experience into linguistic forms. The experience of menstruation, for example, is carved up the following way:

  osháana — to menstruate

  ásháana — to menstruate joyfully

  elasháana — to menstruate for the first time

  husháana — to menstruate painfully

  desháana — to menstruate early

  wesháana — to menstruate late

  Pregnancy is also covered by a range of vocabulary items:

  lawida — to be pregnant

  lalewida — to be pregnant joyfully

  lewidan — to be pregnant for the first time

  lóda — to be pregnant wearily

  widazhad — to be pregnant late in term and eager for the end

  As is menopause:

  zháadin — to menopause

  azháadin — to menopause uneventfully

  elazháadin — to menopause when it’s welcome

  The effort to capture the perspective of women in words is not limited to the particularities of the female body. Other words cover a range of situations that could conceivably be experienced by men, but that are nonetheless designed to make you want to nod your head and go, “Uh-huh. Tell it, sister.”

  radiidin: non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help

  rathom: non-pillow, one who lures another to trust and rely on him or her but has no intention of following through, a “lean on me so I can step aside and let you fall” person

  rathóo: nonguest, someone who comes to visit knowing perfectly well that he or she is intruding and causing difficulty

  ramimelh: to refrain from asking, with evil intent; especially when it is clear that someone badly wants the other to ask

  thehena: joy despite negative circumstances

  bala: anger with reason, with someone to blame, which is futile

  bina: anger with no reason, with no one to blame, which is not futile

  áayáa: mysterious love, not yet known to be welcome or unwelcome

  áazh: love for one sexually desired at one time, but not now

  ab: love for one liked but not respected

  am: love for one related by blood

  The lexicon is shot through with fine distinctions in emotion, attitude, reason, and intention, presumably because these are aspects of experience that are important to women. The fact that English vocabulary doesn’t make such distinctions does not mean they are impossible to talk about
in English, but, as Elgin stresses, it does mean they are more “cumbersome and inconvenient” to talk about, so that women are often accused of “going on and on” when they try to express their perspective on things.

  The idea of female perspective is also carried by aspects of linguistic structure outside the word. Elgin, noting that women are often “vulnerable to hostile language followed by the ancient ‘But all I said was …’ excuse,” built into the syntax a requirement that speakers make clear what they intend when they speak. Every sentence begins with a word indicating the speech act being performed (statement, question, command, request, promise, warning) modified by an ending that marks whether that act is performed neutrally, in anger, in pain, in love, in celebration, in fear, in jest, in narrative, or in teaching. In Láadan the “It wasn’t what you said, it was how you said it” objection can’t be so easily dismissed. If a person uses the marker for a neutral speech act and then tries to claim, “Hey, I was just kidding!” the responsibility is on the speaker for not being clear, and not on the hearer for taking it the wrong way.

  Láadan speakers also have to take responsibility for the validity of what they say. Every sentence ends with an “evidence morpheme” in which the speakers make clear on what grounds they base their statements:

  “They laugh”

  I’m not exactly sure what aspect of women’s perspective the evidence morphemes are supposed to make accessible (Elgin mentions that it makes exchanges like “I’m cold …” “Oh, you ARE not” impossible), but they are a neat thing to have in a language. In fact, markers like this (called “evidentials” in the linguistics literature) actually exist in many languages. When Elgin was constructing Láadan, she drew on aspects of natural languages she thought were “valuable and appropriate” to the job of expressing a woman’s perspective, but I suspect in many cases she incorporated features simply because they appealed to her. As she says, she created the “pejorative” marker ih (it helps turn bini, “gift,” into rabinilh, “a gift with strings attached”) after a similar marker in Navajo, because it “is something so very handy that I have always wished it existed in English.” She sounds less like a woman who has discovered a way to better express women’s perceptions than a linguist who has discovered another juicy tidbit on the ever-fascinating banquet table of natural languages. While her appropriation of the Navajo pejorative marker is justified by her overall goal of making attitudes usually conveyed by body language or tone of voice more explicit, when she lovingly picks it up and places it into her own language, she seems motivated less by scientific mission than by artistic vision. It is not a female thing to have in a language; it is an interesting thing to have.

  Láadan never really took off. Small “working groups” formed here and there, but they dissolved as people got busy with other things. There was also a negative reaction to Láadan from a segment of the lesbian academic community who accused Elgin of being biased against lesbianism because she hadn’t included anything about it in the language. “The whole altercation,” she told me in an e-mail, “caused me great distress and sorrow. The absence of lesbian vocabulary and content was simply an accident of my personal circumstances. I was living way out in the country in rural Arkansas, totally isolated from the academic world and academic feminism. I was totally ‘ignorant’ about lesbianism and couldn’t have written about it even if I’d thought of it.” She offered to include vocabulary relevant to lesbianism in any future editions of the dictionary and solicited suggestions from her critics, but no further editions were published (the new vocabulary does appear in the online dictionary).

  After ten years passed, and women had still not embraced Láadan or come up with another language to replace it, Elgin declared the experiment a failure, noting, with some bitterness, that Klingon (a hyper-male “warrior” language) was thriving. Still, she had found the challenge interesting and “well worth the effort.”

  Bob LeChevalier, who discovered Láadan through his contacts in the science fiction community, found certain aspects of the language so interesting that he was inspired to adapt them for Lojban. After checking with Elgin to make sure she didn’t mind (she didn’t), the Lojbanists developed their own system of evidential markers, as well as a set of special indicators that greatly expanded the range of speaker emotions, attitudes, and intentions that could be expressed. Of course, they ran with it in the usual Lojban way and ended up with a system capable of distinguishing among hundreds, maybe thousands of feelings. Along with ui ([happiness] Yay!), u’u ([repentance] I feel guilty), it ([fear] Eek!), and .o’u ([relaxation] Phew!), there are compound indicators ranging from .uecu’i ([surprise][neutral] ho hum), to .o’unairo’a ([relaxation][opposite][social] I feel social discomfort), to .uiro’obe’unai ([happiness][physical][lack/need][opposite] Yay![physical] Enough!), something you might say after enjoying a big meal. As the Lojban grammar states, “We have tried to err on the side of overkill. There are distinctions possible in this system that no one may care to make in any culture.”

  Strictly speaking, these indicators fall outside the realm of formal logic: their validity cannot be evaluated; there are no truth tables that can account for them. But the Lojbanists love them, and they have a lot of fun playing with them. So much fun that one of them proposed a new language called Cinban (from cinmo bangu, “emotion language”), which would just be English with the attitudinal indicators thrown in, something the Lojbanists had been doing casually for a long time. He set up a new Web forum in which “to practice .o’o [patience] using Cinban until I’m fully fluent .a’o [hopefully] in it. Anyone’s welcome .e’uro’a [suggestion, social] to join me, of course uenaidai [expectation, empathy].” Using the indicators often, and in a creative way, is a hallmark of Lojbanness—which is to say, something Lojban culture values highly.

  Lojban culture? A language, of course, once it gets off the drawing board and into the hands of people who use it, can never be culture-free. Loglan, and Lojban after it, were bound to develop a culture of their own. They attracted a self-selecting group of people who already shared many of the same interests and thought about things in similar ways. As one of them put it in an early issue of the Loglanist, Loglan speakers “have a prior weird-ness that ruins any whorf-test.” To become a Loglanist, you had to, in a certain sense, already think like a Loglanist. James Cooke Brown did not see this as too much of a problem, though, because the experimental tests that were expected to eventually occur would be performed not on the Loglanists who had developed the language but on “normal” subjects, who would learn Loglan in the (culturally) sterile environment of the laboratory. Some Lojbanists still dream of the day when the laboratory tests will finally be implemented, but it is unclear whether even they themselves are capable of learning Lojban to a level of basic proficiency, much less any “normal” people.

  Though Brown put an enormous amount of detailed engineering into his experimental tool, he never had more than a vague and unrealistic plan for how any actual experiments would be conducted. The experiments never took place, and it looks like they never will. While Brown and his followers toiled away on Loglan, the Whorfian hypothesis endured a long half century of being proven, disproven, defended, demolished, revived, mocked, and revived again. Over time, researchers brave enough to get near the Whorfian question have devised increasingly refined experiments designed to look for very specific effects under strict conditions of control. In this context, the idea that you could do something as broad as teach someone an entire made-up language (so many confounding factors!) and look for some kind of effect on thought (measured how?) looks downright amateur.

  But the experiments are beside the point now. The Lojbanists are living out their own personal Whorfian tests. They report that learning Lojban makes them more clear in their use of English; it makes them better at drawing correct logical inferences; it makes them more aware of their metaphysical assumptions, causing them to reexamine their views of the world. They find it mind opening, and these results
, anecdotal and unscientific as they may be, are satisfying in their own way. As one Logfest participant told me, “I like how it messes with my head.”

  Somewhat accidentally, the Lojbanists have come to follow Whorf’s own intended program more closely than did any of the researchers who interpreted his work as a hypothesis that needed to be tested. Whorf took his linguistic relativity principle as a given: different types of grammars “point” people toward different views of the world. The job for the researcher was not to see whether this was true but to explore how it was true. If we were to do this right, we had to be made conscious of our own hidden, language-conditioned thought habits. And the best way to become conscious of them was “through an exotic language, for in its study we are at long last pushed willy-nilly out of our own ruts. Then we find that the exotic language is a mirror held up to our own.”

  Loglan did not become the sober, scientific instrument it was intended to be. It will never prove or disprove anything about the Whorfian hypothesis. However, as it evolved into the Lojban of today by committing itself to its contradictory goals of becoming a language of everything, nothing, and something, it transformed into a different kind of instrument—an enormous, minutely faceted fun-house mirror that, if it doesn’t freak you out too much, will definitely push you out of some of those ruts Whorf was talking about. It’s not science, but it just might be art.