Re: Láadan and woman's speak

On Sat, 20 May 2000 10:34:23 +0400, Peter Clark <pclark@...>
wrote:

>        Thinking of English, I have found that there are several things
>that I would like to name, but have no words for. See my example above. In
>the past, I have used "excited" (which implies more exhiliration than what
>the feeling possesses), "ready" (which lacks the emotional),
>"psyched" (which seems _too_ emotional), or "ansy" (which makes it seem
>too jittery).
>        But perhaps that is why some of us conlang, to provide those
>missing words.
In some cases, I think that might be so. I have a few words of that sort,
like "ghaidja", a general word for the kind of reckless and inconsiderate
drivers that always try to get ahead of everyone else, weaving back and
forth between lanes, taking advantage of random gaps by passing on the
right, squeezing in in front of you without signaling, and generally acting
as if they're on a race track rather than a public highway.

>this lackage. What Kramarae seems to be suggesting (I can't say for sure,
>having never read the book) is that women are _severly_ crippled,
>handicapped even, by the fact that they cannot express themselves
>adequately.
Handicapped is more severe than crippled? It used to be the other way
around.

>        By the way: is anyone who has read the description of Láadan
>slightly miffed at how she describes "lh" (which, from the description,
>sounds like an exagerated lateral fricative, like Welsh "ll") as "not
>especially pleasant to hear"?
I've always liked the sound of lateral fricatives. I used a voiceless
*palatal* lateral fricative in one of my Elvish languages.

>        One parting comment: would someone mind explaining me what
>Goedel's theorem is? The bit about "for every record player there are
>records it can not play because they would lead to its indirect
>self-destruction," sounds like someone was smoking a little too much weed
>one day. :) If I played, say, a record covered with sandpaper, then
>I would wreck the needle, but the player itself would not
>_self_-destruct. Perhaps this would be better off-list, however.
That's a reference to Douglas Hofstadter's exceptional book _Gödel, Escher,
Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid_, and it isn't really a description of
Gödel's Theorem, although in some sense it's analogous. The basic idea of
the theorem is that, for any formal system, there are true theorems such
that the system cannot determine whether they are true or false.

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