Re: Laadan was Re: Posession

Peter Clark wrote at 2003-05-20 14:26:11 (-0500)
 > On Tuesday 20 May 2003 12:26 pm, Stone Gordonssen wrote:
 > > >Natlangs would in this case be a more pleasant source for me.  I
 > > >don't like Laadan much.  Which natlangs distinguish that?
 > >
 > > Sorry for your dislike of Laadan.
 >         Speaking for myself here, one thing that disappointed me
 > about Láadan was that it seems more like an IAL (well, I guess
 > that's what S.H.E. secretly intended to test) than anything
 > profoundly insightful on the linguistic needs of women. Apart from
 > the base gender being feminine, there really wasn't
 > anything...interesting...about it. I got a hold of a sample of the
 > vocabulary and presented it to an expert on women (my wife) and
 > asked her to rate the items by their utility for a woman. There
 > were a couple that counted as "hmm...maybe it would be nice to have
 > a word for that" but in the case of all but one or two words, she
 > could think of short, concise English phrases that were at least
 > adequate for expressing the concept. We had a discussion a couple
 > of months ago about this; try the archives for the full story.

I've never studied Láadan in any detail (the fact that the grammar and
dictionary is copyrighted seems perverse, given SHE's idea that women
might actually want to start using the language, but perhaps things
looked different back before the Internet).  But I'm not sure that the
idea was so much that the Láadan vocabulary would be full of wonderful
neologisms for concepts that women had been crying out for a way to
express, but rather that through certain productive morphological
processes the emotional and social nuances of a situation could be
expressed with greater precision and explicitness, and that this might
be more valuable to women than men.  I'm not at all sure that this is
true, but I still find the emphasis on attitudinal and evidential
morphemes in Láadan _interesting_, whether or not they are
particularly useful to women.

(Incidentally, anyone interested in reviewing past discussion of Láadan
on this list would be well advised to include John Cowan's archives at
http://mercury.ccil.org/~cowan/conlang/
which include at least part of the period when Elgin was herself a
member (starting in February 1995).  My apologies to anyone who asked
for a copy of my archives last time this came up and didn't get one -
I had various problems with mail servers.)


 >         But how could she call /K/ an ugly sound!? Bah! Humbug!
 >         :Peter

It's a feature of Navajo, I think, so it's not as if she independently
decided that it was ugly enough for use as a pejorative
morphophonaestheme[1].  Unfortunately, I can't find any confirmation of
this online apart from an early CONLANG post referring to Láadan. (And
it wasn't by SHE, who presumably would know why she chose /K/ with a
reasonable degree of certainty.)

[1] Probably not an attested word, but you know what I mean.