Re: Láadan

Sally Caves wrote:
>I've been reading through this popular thread piecemeal (pardon me for
>coming to it so late), and what strikes me most is the warmed up argument
>over the meanings or validities of some of these terms, the need for them
>in
>a language that is lacking some emotionally nuanced vocabulary, and the
>fact
>that most of the defense and argument for Elgin's terms are coming from
>MEN,
>despite the question that was posed by Peter to WOMEN.  (We have some women
>on this list; have they responded?)  I also find that I am not alone in
>wondering why this language necessarily has to be one for women; I posed
>that question at the end of my response to the glossary.  As I think Nik or
>someone else said, aside from those referring to menopause or menstruation,
>these words don't seem particularly gender specific.  And yet SHE (an
>acronym that has the comic effect of turning Elgin into a kind of
>"goddess":
>as in SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED) has set out to create LAadan for women's
>hypothetical use.  I understand that it is an exercise, and meant to serve
>as the basis for her novels, but I repeat my suggestion:  why can't
>something like this, a language laden with words that express nuances of
>emotion, deprivation, and social interactions, be useful for both men and
>women?  It seems to me that quite a number of you men identify with the
>paucity of such words in everyday language, and argue for them and their
>meanings strenuously.  What I initially disliked about LAadan, before I
>heard the intellectual arguments surrounding SHE's invention, was that it
>seemed to suggest that women still belonged to a private sphere in which
>there could be no feminine language for public use.  I'm very aware of this
>discrepancy in world politics and gender (I'm teaching Mary Wollstonecraft
>on Tuesday where we'll discuss the relegation of women to the house and to
>silence in a long tradition going back to classical times), and I
>understand
>the gripe expressed in her novels (which I found hard to read and
>annoyingly
>exaggerated and misoandryist--she's a better linguist than she is a
>fiction-writer); and so I felt that her novels and her language did nothing
>to help bring women INTO language.  It just described them as even more
>special, more hidden, more secret, more OTHER than male speakers in the
>public sphere.
>
>Couldn't LAadan describe a linguistic utopia for both men and women?   A
>language that serves to provide social and emotional nuances for men as
>well
>as women?
>
>And the other question, that gets frequently circulated on CONLANG, is the
>usual: why are there at least four times more men on CONLANG than women?  I
>see Amanda, I see Heather (a new name for me--great!), Irina is writing her
>novel, I think;  but popping my head in after a year I see a great number
>of
>new names of male conlangers.  Welcome!  But where are the gals?  (Some of
>these names, granted, are foreign to me, and I'm unsure of gender.  Mau,
>for
>instance).
>
>Yry firrimby, yry toviel,  "grateful, happy" (to be back).
The interesting thing with LAadan, from my male and stereotypically analytic
POV, is the precise and "modular" vocabulary for emotions and related
things. Seeing that people generally are bad at being emotional
simultaneously, I wonder how stable a such system would be. In particular,
I'd be afraid that some of those words would quickly acquire negative
connotations (I'm still im-/depressed at how quickly "ADHD" became a term of
abuse).

As for the "specifically feminine" words, I a) don't see why ONLY women
would have use of a single word for "to menopause uneventfully" - I can
imagine more than a few men having reason to say "I hope my wife'll
menopause uneventfully" or some such - but I b) don't think EITHER men or
women would use it so often that much'd be won by having a single short word
for. The only word I (who's a man whose opinions and experience perhaps
don't count here) 've ever felt to be lacking in English in a "real"
language-use situation of those that've been mentioned in this thread is a
word for what a woman does during sexual intercourse, a hole many native
speakers evidently feel free to plug by using the f-word for either gender.

                                                    Andreas

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