In the Land of Invented Languages

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 Laadan, 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.

Laadan 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 Laadan 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 Laadan 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 Laadan 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.

The Klingons, the Conlangers, and the Art of Language