Girl Talk

[bloodyrosemccoy]

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Well, now. They’ve expanded the online material on Láadan while I was away.

 

Láadan is a conlang I found back in the day when I was first discovering other people’s work online. I was reminded of it now that I’m in gender and lingusitics class, but the truth is that I would study it for all the wrong reasons.

 

Have you ever looked at Láadan? It’s loopy, and it's getting even loopier over the years. It’s a language with an agenda, all about how the patriarchal language of English is inadequate for expressing what women want to say. And apparently, what women want to say is that women are a bunch of sots.

 

I was prejudiced against it almost from the beginning, largely because my reaction to a claim of the latest oppressive force--the produce aisle, say, or squares or whatever--is to roll my eyes. But the first strike against it came right from the introduction page, in which the author, Suzette Haden Elgin, gripes about how nobody likes her language and why does stupid Klingon get all the press?* Yeah, don’t mess with Klingon, bitch, or I bite you, feminism or no.

 

And now they’ve got a dictionary online, and my first impression turned out to be accurate. This language is nuts. It’s got all the features of crazy feminism: words for being put-upon by other people, a whole pile of words for things like menstruation and qualified love,** a diatribe against the verb “marry” as implying that somebody’s doing something to somebody, and my personal favorite, the apotheosis of female sexual organs and experiences through bizarre compound words.*** This is what’s important to women? Angry feminism combined with a fluffy celebration of Femininity? Why would they need a language that explains their body language, when she says that it’s the men who misunderstand body language? Hell, even the sounds are Gurly. There’s some awkward stuff with strings of identical vowels and open consonants and phonemes that make it sound like an elflang. Actually, that’d be interesting to study: what someone thinks should be a woman’s language.

 

I will say one thing, which is that I like the idea of the speech act being clearly defined in the act itself. But I always thought that had the potential for being a lot more fun. I did play around with built-in moods in Yōyōtī Kuitē, which was fun. But to make that a feature of women's language?

 

So why did Klingon catch on instead? Well, my bet is that it’s because there’s no agenda in Klingon. And it sounds better.

 

“Elvish.” Sheesh.

 

 

*Also, she calls Tolkien’s languages “Elvish,” which a conlanger just shouldn’t do.

 

**“I love you. Not in the way of the ancient Greeks, but in the way a robot loves a human, a human loves a dog, and occasionally, a gorilla loves a kitty.”

 

***Who can take a language seriously when its word for “clitoris” literally means “fragrant jewel”?

Comments

[childthursday.livejournal.com]

I kind of like the idea of the language. But this one seems to be something done in reaction to patriarchy, rather than an attempt to create a language that really reflects women's experiences and women's emotions. Hmmm. That may not make sense.

ampersand pointed out that the word for 'man' is a suffix on the word for 'woman.' There - the language even copies the pattern of making one gender an afterthought to the other. It assumes that men and women are radically different and that the genders can be described in terms of how they're not like the other. Why not make the terms neutral?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yeah, she claims the language is not JUST for women, but she gets a little bit overzealous about fixing it. I actually prefer neutral terms--in the conlangs I make for more gender-neutral societies, they simply make no distinction between words for genders (there is no distinction like handsome vs. beautiful, for example).