In the Land of Invented Languages

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 function.” 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.

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