rarulh: non-synergy, that which when combined only makes things worse, less efficient, etc.
rashida: non-game, a cruel “playing” that is a game only for the dominant “players” with the power to force others to participate
rathom: non-pillow, one who lures another to trust and rely on them but has no intention of following through, a “lean on me so I can step aside and let you fall” person
rathóo: non-guest, someone who comes to visit knowing perfectly well that they are intruding and causing difficulty
raweshalh: non-gestalt, a collection of parts with no relationship other than coincidence, a perverse choice of items to call a set; especially when used as “evidence”
sháadehul: growth through transcendence, either of a person, a non-human, or thing (for example, an organization, or a city, or a sect)
wohosheni: a word meaning the opposite of alienation; to feel joined to, part of someone or something without reservations or barriers
wonewith: to be socially dyslexic; uncomprehending of the social signals of others
zhaláad: the act of relinquishing a cherished/comforting/familiar illusion or frame of perception
A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan is published by the Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Inc. For further information send SASE to Láadan, P.O. Box 1137, Huntsville, AR 72740-1137.
Afterword
Encoding a Woman’s Language
Native Tongue (1984) inaugurates Suzette Haden Elgin’s powerful trilogy about the invention of a female language. As the first volume of this trilogy, Native Tongue introduces us to the patriarchal culture of a future Earth, where a small number of linguistically skilled women are banding together to fight their second-class status by secretly creating a women’s language. The sequel, The Judas Rose (1987), follows the story of that language, Láadan, as it evolves from the private creation of a very few women to a shared language that subversively links women worldwide, and then as it is discovered by the patriarchal church and state it was created to oppose. The concluding book in the trilogy, Earthsong (1994), turns from the question of a gender-based language to the broader question of alternate and gender-linked forms of nourishment, as women try to spread the news of another way of feeding the world, aurally rather than orally.
Central to this trilogy, as to most of the science fiction of Suzette Haden Elgin, are two interrelated convictions: “The first hypothesis is that language is our best and most powerful resource for bringing about social change; the second is that science fiction is our best and most powerful resource for trying out social changes before we make them, to find out what their consequences might be” (Elgin, “Linguistics”). Elgin’s definition of feminism can be gleaned from the type of social change she is most interested in making: the eradication of patriarchy and its replacement with “a society and culture that can be sustained without violence” (Elgin, “Feminist” 46). The belief that “patriarchy requires violence in the same way that human beings require oxygen” links the Native Tongue trilogy to Elgin’s bestselling non fiction book, The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense: both are concerned with feminist linguistic interventions, the production and/or teaching of “gentle” linguistic strategies to counter, and thus change, verbal violence (Elgin, “Feminist” 46).
Fifteen years after it was first published, and despite a number of years out of print, Native Tongue retains a cult following and remains an important contribution to the canon of feminist science fiction as well as to feminist debates about the significance of language. Its importance is far more than academic, although it also serves as a historical document highlighting the particular concerns of feminism in the early 1980s. With all of the changes feminism has wrought in American society, Native Tongue and its sequels remain exciting for the sense of expanded social possibilities they embody.
The themes of the Native Tongue books have been woven throughout Suzette Haden Elgin’s life and work. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics, with a focus on the Navajo language, from the University of California at San Diego in 1973, at the age of thirty-seven. Earlier degrees were in French, English, and music, all of which came into play in her later teaching. Elgin taught at San Diego State University until she retired in 1980, at which time she began the Ozark Center for Language Studies near Huntsville, Arkansas. She is the founder and president of LOVINGKINDNESS, a nonprofit organization that investigates religious language and its effect on individuals, as well as the editor and publisher of Linguistics and Science Fiction, a bimonthly newsletter interested in language issues in genre fiction. She writes prolifically in a variety of forms, including fiction, poetry, and essays, and she now draws prolifically as well. Her best-known work, however, is the popular series of books that begins with The Gentle Art of Verbal Self- Defense, which teaches readers how to identify and defuse verbally violent or combative situations.1
Elgin’s most basic tenet is that language is power: “If speaking a language were like brain surgery, learned only after many long years of difficult study and practiced only by a handful of remarkable individuals at great expense, we would view it with similar respect and awe. But because almost every human being knows and uses one or more languages, we have let that miracle be trivialized into ‘only talk’” (Elgin, Language Imperative 239). Overlooked because it is so inherent, language may in fact be “our only real high technology” (Elgin, “Washing Utopian” 45). It is certainly our most prominent social technology, the primary way human beings manipulate the material world (De Lauretis 3). Yet our very familiarity with language leads to its undervaluation. How can something as everyday as talk shape reality?
Elgin subscribes to a widely discussed but highly controversial theory that in linguistics is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.2 This hypothesis claims that languages “structure and constrain human perceptions of reality in significant and interesting ways” (Elgin, Language Imperative xvi). Based on a study of American Indian languages, this hypothesis proposed that languages vary dramatically and in ways not easily anticipated, and that such variations encode dramatically different understandings of reality, so that people speaking different languages actually see the world in widely divergent ways (Bothamley 473). How we perceive the world depends upon our linguistic structures in both the words we choose and the larger metaphors they encode. These structures, for example, powerfully affect our understandings of gender. Assumptions about gender roles are everywhere encoded in our language, particularly in our habit of binary thinking, through which the paired terms male/female become associated with other pairs: active/passive, strong/weak, right/left, and so on. The work of feminist anthropologist Emily Martin provides an excellent example of this idea. In “The Egg and the Sperm,” Martin examines the metaphors used by gynecology and obstetrics textbooks to describe female reproductive processes. Dominant social assumptions about gender roles, she discovers, color the books’ scientific descriptions of conception: the egg is represented as waiting passively for the sperm to compete for the privilege of entering it. Linguistic structures for representing gender lead researchers to focus on characteristics that accord with their conceptual presuppositions. Thus, a passive egg/active sperm model prevails over another model, which might involve a “sticky” egg capturing sperm (1–18).
According to the Sapir-Whorf line of thinking, language structures our perceptions not only through word choice, but through metaphors and metaphor systems, with benefits, limitations, and concrete consequences. For example, as Elgin points out in The Language Imperative, the language we use to talk about menopause influences how we experience it. The description of menopause as “a natural event” will produce one set of effects; with this model, a woman going through menopause is likely to interpret any negative experiences as annoyances (minor or major) rather than medicalizing them. However, if menopause is described as “a medical condition characterized by a lack of estrogen,” the menopausal woman is more likely to interpr
et her experiences in terms of pathology, leading to medical intervention as well as increased concern on the part of the woman, her family, and her friends. This linguistic shift has an effect on the woman’s material reality (75–80). It is important to point out that there is no way out of this dilemma produced by the linguistic construction of reality. Because the language we use has developed alongside human history, we are inevitably embroiled in these issues. While no form of speech is inherently better than another, the effects of different speech acts are often very different, and Elgin encourages us to judge speech on that basis. Summarized briefly, Elgin’s linguistic position has powerful feminist implications: The language we use to describe and operate in the world affects the way we understand the world, our place in it, and our interactions with one another. Changing our language changes our world.
This idea is not unique to Elgin, nor to linguistics. Other feminist thinkers have also addressed the ways that language shapes our perceptions. French feminist philosophers Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray have both considered how language reinforces existing gender relations. Cixous argues that the subordinate position of women has its foundation in the Western habit of thinking in dual, hierarchized oppositions. Holding that the logical and linear structures of modern Western languages reproduce the values and prejudices of patriarchy, Luce Irigaray further claims that women need our own language if we are to free ourselves from domination. This idea that language matters in the day-to-day existence of humans thus brings together a variety of different disciplines and links different feminist projects. This idea is also not unique to feminist theory; it has been addressed by such philosophers as Ferdinand Saussure, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.
It also has far-reaching social and political implications. Elgin wrote what she has called the “thought experiment” of the Native Tongue books in order to test four hypotheses:
1) that the weak form of the linguistic relativity hypothesis is true [that human languages structure human perceptions in significant ways]; 2) that Gödel’s Theorem applies to language, so that there are changes you could not introduce into a language without destroying it and languages you could not introduce into a culture without destroying it;3 3) that change in language brings about social change, rather than the contrary; and 4) that if women were offered a women’s language one of two things would happen—they would welcome and nurture it, or it would at minimum motivate them to replace it with a better women’s language of their own construction. (“Láadan”)
Elgin admits that the experiment did not produce the desired outcome: the fourth hypothesis was proven false when her constructed women’s language, Láadan, failed to be taken up in any meaningful way. But the broader questions she raises, concerning gender, language, and power, continue to resonate.
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Should we be surprised to find these urgent feminist concerns addressed in a work of science fiction? That has been the initial response of some feminists. For example, when Carolyn Heilbrun reviewed Native Tongue in 1987 for the Women’s Review of Books, she described herself as “a non-reader of science fiction” (17). Despite her self-confessed “resistance to SF (not that I dislike it, but that I can never figure out what’s going on),” Heilbrun gave Native Tongue a glowing review: “There isn’t a phony or romantic moment here,” she observed, “and the story is absolutely compelling” (17). It is worth asking why science fiction has been anathema to many feminists, and worth offering a quick list of the reasons science fiction deserves a feminist audience. Feminist distaste for science fiction must be more than simply a response to its relatively low status as “genre fiction,” since other forms of genre fiction, from the detective novel to the romance, have their staunch feminist adherents. Responding to the historic linkages between science and its traditional values—especially masculinist objective rationality—feminist readers and critics have challenged science as a method of inquiry about the world. They have tended to avoid scientific issues, themes, plots, and images, focusing instead on the crucial projects of reclaiming forgotten women writers, questioning the gendered nature of the literary canon, and imagining alternative forms for literary expression (Squier 132–158).
“Toys for boys”: all too often, this phrase has seemed to accurately sum up the science fiction genre. But precisely because science and science fiction have seemed the rightful terrain of men at their most macho, feminists should give the genre their renewed attention, revitalizing its form and its content. The issue is, as Elgin has taught us, linguistic at its core. Until we abolish the culturally enforced hierarchical relations between science and the humanities that maintain literature as an insignificant, invisible, and feminized part of our culture in relation to significant, visible, masculinized science, we haven’t made the large-scale linguistic transformation that Elgin herself calls for. We are still representing the world by gendered binary pairs (male/female; science/literature), and ceding to males the science half of the two-culture divide. Science, in short, is as open to feminist redefinition as any of the other words in our lexicon. Rather than abandoning it, we simply need to encode it anew and reclaim it as one of our native tongues.
The scientific study of alien species, a classic science fiction focus on the future, and a feminist preoccupation with the science of linguistics connect science fiction and feminism in the three interrelated narratives that compose Native Tongue. The primary story follows the development of the woman-language Láadan by the women of the Linguist Lines, especially the protagonist, Nazareth Chornyak Adiness. A parallel story line traces the U.S. government’s secret attempts to break the linguistic monopoly of the Lines by successfully learning, or “Interfacing” with, a non-humanoid alien language. A third narrative strand follows Michaela, a non-linguist, as she attempts to avenge her infant, who was killed in a state experiment to break the language monopoly; instead she finds surprising commonality with the linguist women. While these three narratives do not always connect smoothly, taken together they explore the constructive power of language, the origin of gendered oppression, and the material and social commonalities between women.
Elgin explores the nature, power, and significance of language through the distinction between humanoid and non-humanoid languages, and the different worldview each constructs. Any language is a limited set of perceptions and expressions; the rough similarity of humanoid languages, and thus the rough correspondence of their worldviews, is what allows them to be Interfaced. Dramatically different worldviews separate humanoid and non-humanoid languages, and thus the realities they construct, which explains the dangers of Interfacing humanoid and non-humanoid languages. The government technicians, in an effort to work through the problem of non-humanoid languages, articulate the relationship of language to reality:
“First principle: there’s no such thing as reality. We make it up by perceiving stimuli from the environment—external or internal—and making statements about it. Everybody perceives stuff, everybody makes up statements about it, everybody—so far as we can tell—agrees enough to get by, so that when I say ‘Hand me the coffee’ you know what to hand me. And that’s reality. Second principle: people get used to a certain kind of reality and come to expect it, and if what they perceive doesn’t fit the set of statements everybody’s agreed to, either the culture has to go through a kind of fit until it adjusts . . . or they just blank it out.” (140)
Elgin puts it this way in the epigraph to chapter 13: ‘“For any language, there are perceptions which it cannot express because they would result in its indirect self-destruction”’ (145). Thomas Chornyak describes the failure to Interface with non-humanoids as an intrinsic limitation: “It was distressing, but it was not ridiculous. No human being could hold his breath for thirty minutes; that was a natural barrier, and one learned not to fling oneself at it. No human being, so far as he knew, could share the worldview of a non-humanoid. It was not ridiculous” (66). The Government Work technicians articulate the intrinsic limitatio
ns more specifically as ‘“human beings are hardwired to expect certain kinds of perceptions”’ (140). Language, then, is both biological, in that our biological brains can form certain kinds of perceptions, and cultural, in that every language and culture uses a smaller set of perceptions and expressions from the larger set of hardwired possibilities.
This imbrication of the physical and the social is demonstrated most forcefully when the technicians pursue the experimental Interfacing between human infants and non-humanoid aliens despite warnings of disaster from the linguists. The leader of the group, Showard, finally concludes, “‘There’s something about the way the non-humanoid aliens perceive things, something about the “reality” they make out of stimuli, so impossible that it freaks out the babies and destroys their central nervous systems permanently’” (141). One infant, in an attempt to Interface with Beta-2, the resident non-humanoid alien, had convulsed so violently that it “literally turned itself inside out” (48). That the problem is not simply one of human linguistic and cognitive limitations is demonstrated by the subsequent experiment, in which the technicians try to alter consciousness and thus worldview by feeding the infants hallucinogens (186). This time, when they get the dosage “right” and Interface the infant, it is the alien being, Beta-2, that goes mad and dies, showering sparks throughout the Interface (188). The infants who survive the experiment cannot, so far as other people can tell, communicate in any way comprehensible to humans, although they appear normal and healthy.
The constitution of reality through language is more than simply a psychological effect in Native Tongue. As the Interfacing experiments reveal, language has the power to fundamentally reorder the material world, producing vibrant life or violent death. Moreover, language is constitutive in a number of other ways. A large part of the popular prejudice against linguists stems from their ability to manipulate verbal and non-verbal language. John Smith, a government liaison to the linguists, “knew that there was absolutely nothing an ordinary citizen could do if a linguist decided to structure an encounter in such a way that that citizen would look like a perfect ass” (63). And he knows this is also true of the linguist women: “Oh, they observed all the forms, those women; they said all the right words. But they had a way of somehow leading the conversation around so that words came out of your mouth that you’d never heard yourself say before and would have taken an oath you couldn’t be made to say” (63). Examples of this linguistic power dynamic abound, both between linguists and citizens (“Thomas tilted his head a fraction, and Jones felt deeply inferior for no reason that he could understand” [63]) and between male and female linguists. For example, Rachel is unable to countermand her training as a linguist and resort to tears (“Women of the Lines learned early not to give in to tears . . . because tears destroyed negotiations” [149]) and she thus fails in her attempt to dissuade Thomas from marrying Nazareth to a powerful linguist she hates. In fact, a frequent refrain in the book is “you can’t lie to a linguist.”
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