In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [85]
radiidin: non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help
rathom: non-pillow, one who lures another to trust and rely on him or her but has no intention of following through, a “lean on me so I can step aside and let you fall” person
rathóo: nonguest, someone who comes to visit knowing perfectly well that he or she is intruding and causing difficulty
ramimelh: to refrain from asking, with evil intent; especially when it is clear that someone badly wants the other to ask
thehena: joy despite negative circumstances
bala: anger with reason, with someone to blame, which is futile
bina: anger with no reason, with no one to blame, which is not futile
áayáa: mysterious love, not yet known to be welcome or unwelcome
áazh: love for one sexually desired at one time, but not now
ab: love for one liked but not respected
am: love for one related by blood
The lexicon is shot through with fine distinctions in emotion, attitude, reason, and intention, presumably because these are aspects of experience that are important to women. The fact that English vocabulary doesn't make such distinctions does not mean they are impossible to talk about in English, but, as Elgin stresses, it does mean they are more “cumbersome and inconvenient” to talk about, so that women are often accused of “going on and on” when they try to express their perspective on things.
The idea of female perspective is also carried by aspects of linguistic structure outside the word. Elgin, noting that women are often “vulnerable to hostile language followed by the ancient ‘But all I said was …’ excuse,” built into the syntax a requirement that speakers make clear what they intend when they speak. Every sentence begins with a word indicating the speech act being performed (statement, question, command, request, promise, warning) modified by an ending that marks whether that act is performed neutrally, in anger, in pain, in love, in celebration, in fear, in jest, in narrative, or in teaching. In Láadan the “It wasn't what you said, it was how you said it” objection can't be so easily dismissed. If a person uses the marker for a neutral speech act and then tries to claim, “Hey, I was just kidding!” the responsibility is on the speaker for not being clear, and not on the hearer for taking it the wrong way.
Láadan speakers also have to take responsibility for the validity of what they say. Every sentence ends with an “evidence morpheme” in which the speakers make clear on what grounds they base their statements:
“They laugh”
I'm not exactly sure what aspect of women's perspective the evidence morphemes are supposed to make accessible (Elgin mentions that it makes exchanges like “I'm cold …” “Oh, you ARE not” impossible), but they are a neat thing to have in a language. In fact, markers like this (called “evidentials” in the linguistics literature) actually exist in many languages. When Elgin was constructing Láadan, she drew on aspects of natural languages she thought were “valuable and appropriate” to the job of expressing a woman's perspective, but I suspect in many cases she incorporated features simply because they appealed to her. As she says, she created the “pejorative” marker ih (it helps turn bini, “gift,” into rabinilh, “a gift with strings attached”) after a similar marker in Navajo, because it “is something so very handy that I have always wished it existed in English.” She sounds less like a woman who has discovered a way to better express women's perceptions than a linguist who has discovered another juicy tidbit on the ever-fascinating banquet table of natural languages. While her appropriation of the Navajo pejorative marker is justified by her overall goal of making attitudes usually conveyed by body language or tone of voice more explicit, when she lovingly picks