welcome to Conlang Critic,
the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang!
I'm jan Misali, and in this episode, we'll be looking
at the Language of Perception,
Láadan.
unlike the other conlangs we've looked at on this show
so far, Láadan is not an
international language. while international
languages are this show's primary focus,
there are many other types of conlangs out there that deserve
to be looked at. of course, things that are bad
for an international language aren't necessarily
bad for other types of conlangs, and vice versa.
Láadan is an artlang, created by the late
Suzette Haden Elgin in 1982,
featured in her book series, Native Tongue.
within the Native Tongue universe, Láadan is a
language created by a group of female linguists in the
22nd century, as an act of resistance against
the oppressive government, which had stripped women of their
voting rights in 1996. the point of Láadan,
both in Native Tongue and in the real world,
is to be a language that doesn't inherit aspects of a
male dominated society. many languages treat male
like it's the default, but female like it's abnormal,
but in Láadan, female is the default.
this basic concept was the starting point pretty much
every other aspect of Láadan descended from.
not including the phonology and orthography, of course,
because that doesn't make sense,
but that's the first thing we're looking at anyway!
Láadan has a pretty small inventory.
It's not very naturalistic, but
keep in mind that even in universe it's still a
constructed language, so the sounds it has were chosen
for their a e s t h e t i c value, rather than their
function. the consonants are:
and here are the vowels:
also, Láadan is a tonal language, which
I think is a very nice touch.
its tonemes are:
other than tone, the only sound in Láadan that isn't also
in English is /ɬ/, which is a pretty
easy sound to learn how to make. however,
due to the large number of sounds that aren't there, you're not
going to confuse Láadan with English. since there's
no alveolar fricative, voiceless stops, or low tones,
it not only sounds completely different, but also
looks completely different, just looking at the waveform.
this is the exact type of inventory that makes for an
interesting artlang. now, as for the orthography,
my only real problem with it is the digraphs.
like, if Láadan had a larger inventory,
the use of sh for /ʃ/, for example,
would make perfect sense, but Láadan isn't using
sh to distinguish between /s/ and /ʃ/.
in fact, the letters s, z, and t
only appear in digraphs.
this could've been avoided entirely if Láadan instead
did something like this. however, I do
completely get that this would be a little harder for
English speakers to understand, such as the English speakers
who are reading a science fiction book and don't
wanna read an explanation of its future language's orthography.
as it is, Láadan's orthography is
extremely intuitive to its target audience.
I especially like the way it writes tone. see,
most tonal languages that use the Latin alphabet
either use diacritical marks or numbers
that correspond to each of the language's tonemes.
so, it would be completely naturalistic for
Láadan's four tones to be written something like this,
or, even worse, like this.
instead, Láadan takes advantage of the fact that it only has
two tone levels, and writes the middle tone
with no diacritic, and the high tone
with an acute, and writes the rising and falling tones
with two letters each. that way, all you really need to
say to explain it to someone is that
an acute accent means a high tone.
this works perfectly for Láadan, and even works better
than the way a lot of natural languages write tone.
now we can get to the real selling point for Láadan:
its vocabulary. this is where Láadan really
reveals itself. the first thing worth pointing out is
the suffix "-id", which means "male".
it's sort of like the opposite of the English "-ess" suffix.
but what Láadan does with the "-id" suffix
goes way further. "hatheril"
means the past, but "hatherilid"
means "the past, but with more of a focus on wars
and sporting events". as great as that is,
there's one problem with this. see, Láadan's word for "human"
also means "woman", and Láadan's
word for "it" also means "she".
probably unintentionally,
Láadan divides people into two categories:
"male" and "not male", with no
singular term that refers to people without
putting them in one of these two categories, and
no category more specific than "not male",
meaning that, depending on how you interpret it,
it's either impossible to specifically talk about women,
or it's both impossible to
talk about someone without mentioning their gender, you know,
like what I just did now, and impossible to talk about
people who are nonbinary.
either way, this is pretty bad.
this problem exists in other languages, too,
but it's weird that a language designed specifically
with feminism as its primary goal would contain
any sexism whatsoever! *sigh*
okay, back to the good stuff. Láadan's grammar
is full of great, unenglishy features.
it's got VSO word order, paucal number,
ergativity, and a "hate" affix,
but the most interesting feature, in my opinion,
is evidentiality. every sentence ends
with some word indicating how trustworthy
the information in it is. so that way, you're kind of like citing
your sources. there's words for "I observed this
firsthand", "this truth is self evident",
"I heard this from someone I trust",
"I heard this from someone I distrust",
"I saw this in a dream once", "this is obviously wrong
because the person who said it is evil", and
"I have no idea what I'm talking about".
It's going to be hard to compare
Láadan directly to Lojban, aUI,
and Vötgil. all of those languages were
similar enough to one another in what they were trying to
accomplish that it was easy to see which ones were doing
it best. Láadan isn't doing that.
I can't just say, "well,
Lojban's orthography is less Anglocentric than Láadan,
so it's better!" cause that's
not what Láadan is trying to do. and even
though it does fail to be completely unsexist,
that's not really any worse than Lojban
failing to treat all country names the same way,
or aUI failing to make sense,
or Vötgil failing to have any
redeeming qualities whatsoever. the difference is
that Láadan's other positive qualities
make up for it. that in mind, Láadan
is the current best conlang reviewed
so far.
hey, everyone. jan Misali here.
I'd just like to thank everyone who's been
watching this series for all your support.
if you wanna help out the show,
best thing that you can do is suggest
what conlangs you wanna see in future episodes.
there's links in the description
to all the places you can do that.
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on toki-ito-li-pona.tumblr.com.
that's where I'll post
updates about future episodes.
thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.