Re: Martian conlangs?

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andreas Johansson" <andjo@...>


> Quoting Sally Caves <scaves@...>:
> > Yes.  In the dreary Marina Yaguello, Les Fous du langage, a.k.a.
> > _Lunatic
> > Lovers of Language_.  She assigns it the status of a "female" invented
> > language.  I.e., "expressive" and "hysteric."  As opposed to the
> > "male"
> > invented language of Nicolas Marr whom she despises, I.e., "analytical"
> > and
> > idiotic.
>
> While I don't necessarily agree, I think I know why she'd consider
"hysteric" a
> feminine and "analytical" a masculine trait. But how is being "expressive"
> feminine, and does she really consider "idiotic" a masculine trait?
>
>                                                               Andreas
Mea culpa, "expressive" and "analytic" are Jeffrey Schnapp's terms for the
two poles that he has borrowed from Yaguello: the one defining an
"infantile-regressive" use of language to be found in oneiric or
trance-states (like glossalalia and Hildegard's Lingua Ignota-- I challenge
him in my article and in several talks I've given) and the analytical or
consciously thought-out linguistic structures of the language philosophers
and later IAL inventors.  But he's infused with Yaguello and Yaguello's
sources on these topics.

The "idiotic" was my sarcastic term.  Yaguello's prose is poisoned by barely
contained rage against mostly Marr, whom she calls "deranged."  Perhaps it
sounds more jovial in its original French, but to my mind she paints with
large brush strokes that are frequently offensive (to me).  Here's an
example, in Catherine Slater's translation:  "So what stands out are two
radically opposed approaches to language, two types of relationship with it.
On the one hand, an intellect, a rational, analytic, and logical
understanding, a utopian-constructive one which aims to organise the world,
and is masculine in essence.  On the other, a grasp that is intuitive,
instinctive, spontaneous, globalising, sensual, primitive-infantile,
fanciful, subject to hidden drives, in short, hysterical, all of which are
defining characteristics of women, children, and lunatics."

Now while she probably redeems herself with that modifier "defining," I find
that many of the characteristics of her logophile, particularly Marr, are
feminine: the spontaneous, the globalising, the fanciful, the subject to
hidden drives, the deranged, the egoistic.  If she wants a model for the
masculine and the analytic, why not choose Jespersen, who also invented an
IAL?  Her need to discredit Marr not only mars her argument, but she
conflates a bad linguist with a language inventor, and thus has to have a
category, logophile, that includes glossopoeists and language theorists.

The logophile, the lunatic in love with language, is usually a man from
Central Europe, she writes, a "study-dweller," "a man with a pointed beard
and gold-rimmed spectacles."  Elsewhere, and I can't find the page, the
usual glossalalist, she writes, is a black woman.  THAT kind of
essentializing rhetoric.

And the words "lunatic" or "madman" or "pathology" are practically on every
other page of her book.  Hence my "lunatic survey" in 1998.  :)

> PS Of course, "idiotically analytical" is not to far off the mark to
describe
> boys who atomize things "just to see how it works". :-)
Yeah yeah.  :)  Me too.


Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."
http://www.media-culture.org.au/0003/languages.html
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teoreal2.html