In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [86]
Láadan never really took off. Small “working groups” formed here and there, but they dissolved as people got busy with other things. There was also a negative reaction to Láadan from a segment of the lesbian academic community who accused Elgin of being biased against lesbianism because she hadn't included anything about it in the language. “The whole altercation,” she told me in an e-mail, “caused me great distress and sorrow. The absence of lesbian vocabulary and content was simply an accident of my personal circumstances. I was living way out in the country in rural Arkansas, totally isolated from the academic world and academic feminism. I was totally ‘ignorant’ about lesbianism and couldn't have written about it even if I'd thought of it.” She offered to include vocabulary relevant to lesbianism in any future editions of the dictionary and solicited suggestions from her critics, but no further editions were published (the new vocabulary does appear in the online dictionary).
After ten years passed, and women had still not embraced Láadan or come up with another language to replace it, Elgin declared the experiment a failure, noting, with some bitterness, that Klingon (a hyper-male “warrior” language) was thriving. Still, she had found the challenge interesting and “well worth the effort.”
Bob LeChevalier, who discovered Láadan through his contacts in the science fiction community, found certain aspects of the language so interesting that he was inspired to adapt them for Lojban. After checking with Elgin to make sure she didn't mind (she didn't), the Lojbanists developed their own system of evidential markers, as well as a set of special indicators that greatly expanded the range of speaker emotions, attitudes, and intentions that could be expressed. Of course, they ran with it in the usual Lojban way and ended up with a system capable of distinguishing among hundreds, maybe thousands of feelings. Along with ui ([happiness] Yay!), u'u ([repentance] I feel guilty), it ([fear] Eek!), and .o'u ([relaxation] Phew!), there are compound indicators ranging from .uecu'i ([surprise][neutral] ho hum), to .o'unairo'a ([relaxation][opposite][social] I feel social discomfort), to .uiro'obe'unai ([happiness][physical][lack/need][opposite] Yay![physical] Enough!), something you might say after enjoying a big meal. As the Lojban grammar states, “We have tried to err on the side of overkill. There are distinctions possible in this system that no one may care to make in any culture.”
Strictly speaking, these indicators fall outside the realm of formal logic: their validity cannot be evaluated; there are no truth tables that can account for them. But the Lojbanists love them, and they have a lot of fun playing with them. So much fun that one of them proposed a new language called Cinban (from cinmo bangu, “emotion language”), which would just be English with the attitudinal indicators thrown in, something the Lojbanists had been doing casually for a long time. He set up a new Web forum in which “to practice .o'o [patience] using Cinban until I'm fully fluent .a'o [hopefully] in it. Anyone's welcome .e'uro'a [suggestion, social] to join me, of course uenaidai [expectation, empathy].” Using the indicators often, and in a creative way, is a hallmark of Lojbanness—which is to say, something Lojban culture values highly.
Lojban culture? A language, of course, once it gets off the drawing board and into the hands of people who use it, can never be culture-free. Loglan, and Lojban after it, were bound to develop a culture of their own. They attracted a self-selecting group of people who already shared many of the same interests and thought about things in similar ways. As one of them put it in an early issue of the Loglanist, Loglan speakers “have a prior weird-ness that ruins any whorf-test.” To become a Loglanist, you had to, in a certain