ranem: non-pearl, an ugly thing one builds layer by layer as an oyster does a pearl, such as a festering hatred to which one pays attention
rani: non-cup, a hollow accomplishment, something one acquires or receives or accomplishes but empty of all satisfaction
rarilh: to deliberately refrain from recording; for example, the failure throughout history to record the accomplishments of women.
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”
sháadehuclass="underline" 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).
1
Elgin’s nonfictions series has grown quite extensive. In addition to the original
2
While linguists have, for the most part, discarded this theory in favor of the school of thought pioneered by Noam Chomsky — which contends that the capacity for language is wired into our brains by evolution, rather than developed as a result of our environment — the idea survives in many other disciplines. All the same, there is some confusion about the actual meaning of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The “strong” version, which Elgin claims no one has ever advocated, says that our language determines our perception of reality (