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Article Excerpt
"I am a foreigner to myself in my own language and I translate myself by quoting all the others."
--Gagnon 180
"We have to invent a woman's word. But not 'of' woman, 'about' woman, in the way that man's language speaks 'of' woman. Any woman who wants to use a language that is specifically her own, cannot avoid this extraordinary, urgent task: we must invent woman."
--Lee1ere 74
The Thought Experiment of Native Tongue
* During the 1970s, feminist linguists and scholars began to critique the part that the English language played in constructing and upholding patriarchy. Following the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, which I shall discuss in more detail later, these individuals claimed that language does not merely describe reality, but also structures how it is perceived. More specifically, they argued that an androcentric language that excludes and marginalizes women translates into patriarchal societies that do the same. Consequently, feminist linguists argued the need either to transform the English language so that it was no longer androcentric, or to invent new languages that would allow women to be free and equal.
Suzette Haden Elgin--a professional linguist who holds a doctorate in the subject, and who also writes science fiction and poetry--adopted the latter strategy. She created a synthetic language, Laadan, that attempted to express female perceptions in a way that existing languages failed to do. (1) She considered the invention of this language as part of a much larger thought experiment designed to test the following four hypotheses:
1) that the weak form ofthe linguistic relativity hypothesis is true ...; 2) that Godel'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) 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. ("Laadan," paragraph 3)
As a central part of this project, Elgin wrote the Native Tongue trilogy in which she presents a fictional history for Laadan and imagines what its effects on society might be. These novels were primarily intended to popularise Laadan among the general public, and to test the impact a women's language would have on the real world ("Earthsong FAQ," paragraphs 4-5).
Set three centuries in the future, the Native Tongue trilogy tells of a North America where the Nineteenth Amendment has been repealed and where women have lost their citizen rights as a result. They are no longer able to vote, hold property in their own right, or work outside the home without the permission of a male relative. Earth in general is dependent upon interplanetary commerce for its wealth. Consequently, linguists have become of central importance to the societies in which they live and work. They are responsible for ensuring successful negotiations between humans and extraterrestrials, acting as both interpreters and cultural advisors. Because of the importance of the task and the extreme difficulty of most alien languages, linguist dynasties have developed that train their children in a single alien language, multiple human languages, and linguistic theory. In this society, a group of linguist women sets out to challenge patriarchal power by using the only weapon they have available to them--language. Among themselves, they develop a women's language, Laadan, in an attempt to change the androcentric character of society and liberate women from patriarchal control.
In what follows, I provide a case study of Laadan as the most well-known, modern synthetic language constructed to express women's perceptions. My discussion focuses primarily on the Native Tongue trilogy, since the novels should read as the thought laboratory which Elgin not only uses to set her experiment in motion but also to explore possible outcomes of it. In particular, I explore the manner in which Elgin uses the novels to demonstrate that an androcentric language leads to a patriarchal society, and that a shift to a women's language may transform a dystopia into a society more like a feminist eutopia. Before I discuss the novels, however, I need to place them within both their theoretical and political contexts. To that end, I explain what is meant by Godel's First Theorem and the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, as those concepts are central to Elgin's argument in the novel and her thought experiment in general. After that, I provide a brief overview of feminist linguistics during the 1960s and 1970s, in which I touch on certain of the field's major ideas and concerns that fed into the development of Laadan.
Godel's First Theorem of Incompleteness
The first proposition of Elgin's thought experiment is that Godel's First Theorem applies to language. In a simplified and generalised form, Godel's First Theorem states that, within every fixed system, there exist meaningful statements that are undecidable. By this, Godel means that certain statements exist which cannot be proved or disproved, not because of some shortcoming in human reason or knowledge (as was the case with Fermat's Last Theorem for many years), but because logic itself makes it impossible.
Godel's First Theorem is not only relevant to the field of mathematics, but also has applications in many other fields. For instance, the theorem can be applied to the fixed systems of language, as Elgin implies in the hypotheses that underpin her thought experiment. An example of this application can be found in Eubulides of Miletus' paradox, which Godel himself proved mathematically. Eubulides was a member of the Megarian school of philosophy, which was characterised by its interest in logic and argumentation. He was particularly interested in paradoxes, and is best known for posing the following question: "A man says that he is lying. Is what he says true or false?" Evidently, this question cannot be answered one way or the other. If the man's statement is considered true, the underlying logic would be that he is telling the truth about lying, hence that he is not lying. Similarly, if the statement is considered false, the logic would be that he is lying about lying, hence that he is not lying. Therefore, even though the man's statement is meaningful and follows the rules of syntax, it is undecidable.
Nevertheless, Elgin extends Godel's First Theorem further than most scholars, following an anecdote in Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Structured as a Platonic dialogue between Tortoise and Achilles, Hofstadter's story tells of a certain Crab who owns a "perfect" record player that he believes is capable of reproducing any and all sounds. Tortoise proves him incorrect by composing a song that causes the record player to vibrate in a certain way and destroy itself (77). Tortoise logically concludes that, since the record player fails to reproduce its own self-breaking sound, it cannot play all possible sounds. Achilles points out that Crab could prevent the breakage from occurring by playing the song on a low-fidelity record player, but Tortoise reminds him that doing so would "defeat the original purpose--namely, to have a phonograph that could reproduce any sound whatever"(77). Either way, the record player fails to be perfect, as the set of sounds that it can reproduce is incomplete. Phrasing this conclusion in terms of Godel's First Theorem, we might say that there are certain sounds in the fixed set of sounds that the record player can reproduce that are indecidable, because they bring about the system's destruction. This anecdote inspired Elgin to speculate that there are changes that cannot not be introduced to a language without destroying it, and languages that cannot not be introduced to a culture without destroying it (Native Tongue 145).
The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
The second proposition of Elgin's thought experiment is that the weak form of the linguistic relativity hypothesis is true. In its weak form, this hypothesis states that human languages "structure and constrain human perceptions of reality in significant and interesting ways" (Squier and Vedder 308). By way of contrast, it is worth noting that the strong form of the hypothesis argues that language creates or structures reality itself, and is largely discredited as an overstatement (Squier and Vedder 308).
Historically, the linguistic relativity hypothesis was the creation of two American anthropologists and linguists--Edward Sapir and his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf--and their writing seems to endorse both the strong and weak forms of it in different places.[sup.2] In his 1929 paper on linguistics as a science, Sapir suggests that language is not "merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection," but that reality is "to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group" (69). In other words, reality is not something objective to be described or grasped through language, but is constructed by it or at least always perceived through its distorting lens.[sup.3]
Whorf extended his teacher and mentor's beliefs further, arguing that the differences between languages mean that different ethnic groups have different views of the world. He was particularly interested in the Hopi language, which makes no distinction between the past, present and future tenses, but which is able to describe the natural phenomena encountered by the tribe with a great deal of precision. Therefore, Whorf concluded that, if Sapir were correct about language being humankind's primary means of structuring the world around them, the Hopi perception of reality would be very different from that of Western scientists. He expresses these beliefs in a widely quoted passage:
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds--and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way--an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we...
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