Láadan was Re: Computer Language Question

On Wednesday 27 November 2002 08:42 am, Amanda Babcock wrote:
> I would add to that "tlhIngan is a tie-in to a popular mass-media
> phenomenon" and, most annoyingly, "Láadan does not allow free access
> to the grammar and vocabulary".  If you want something to be a success,
> *don't copyright it*.
>
> (I know, tlhIngan was commercial too, but we're back to that mass-media
> thing then.)
        Well, it seems as though Suzette Haden Elgin has pretty much abandoned it.
She originally intended it to provide both a realistic setting for her
novels, and as an experiment to test some '70s feminist theories that
languages are inherently unsuitable for women to express themselves in,
because of the patriarchal system (<quote source="Monty Python and the Holy
Grail">Come see the the patriarchy inherent in the system!</quote>). Elgin
explains the nitty-gritty on her site:
http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/Laadan.html
        Personally, I don't Láadan woman-centric enough. A couple of months ago, I
asked my wife what she thought of it and she agreed--the grammar, to be
certain, doesn't offer enough of an advantage to overcome the work involved
in learning a second language. I still have not found a list of
"woman-centric" words, but after asking my wife how English vocabulary could
be improved, she initially said that emotion words could use more shading of
meaning--until she began to list some emotion words and realized that for the
most part, English has an overabundance of nuanced emotion words; gaps she
tends to fill in with Japanese loans. She suggested that the reason that she
doesn't use them is because they sound to lofty and erudite; if woman (and
men, for that matter) were to use them more, they probably would not seem so
"high."
        I (and my wife, when she read Elgin's essay) found the underlying theory
deeply flawed and rather offensive to women in general, especially the first
premise: "Those languages lacked vocabulary for many things that are
extremely important to women, making it cumbersome and inconvenient to talk
about them." There seems to be no sociological constraint on the invention of
new words, besides the necessity that other listeners understand them. My
wife feels free to borrow from Japanese and Romanian whenever the English
word eludes her, and we manage to understand each other just fine. One would
think that if women in general found an unnamed concept important enough to
name, they would do so--assuming a feminist critique, it would not even be
necessary for the word to be accepted by the male half because it would still
carry currency with the female half.
        That said, I would be interested in ideas for a "woman-centric" language.
What do the doubly-blessed X chromosomers think?
        :Peter

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