My Dragons
Ever-So-Subtle
Having heard the name brought up on Making Light, I once again went off to the best online source about Láadan (which frankly isn't very good) to read stuff I already knew, and ran across once again a quote from Suzette Haden Elgin that pisses me off every time I see it.
She has an essay about her experiment with Láadan, a language she constructed for use in her Native Tongue trilogy (about which I have many other opinions, starting with the Benevolent Advanced Beings of Judas Rose, but that's a subject for another post). The idea of Láadan is that it's intended to "express the perceptions of women", which is cool and a respectable design goal, and honestly I think she accomplished it well. But part of her idea was to release Láadan "into the wild", as it were, and see whether women would really learn it because it expressed their perceptions better than the common run of natural languages. She gave the experiment ten years.
Unsurprisingly, it bombed. Meanwhile Klingon--an equally constructed language, but with phonology and grammar so much more difficult as to be almost a different quality of thing altogether--is doing magnificently. And here's where we get to that quote that bugs me; the last line of the essay is, "Meanwhile, the Klingon language thrives -- from which you are free to draw your own conclusions." This looks to me an awful lot like snarky commentary on the differences between Klingon and Láadan, and how the outlook Klingon promotes is better served by current culture, and so forth. I could be wrong, but this is the woman who wrote The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, and I'm pretty sure she can drive a barb in when it suits her.
So if I'm free to draw my own conclusions, they are these: that Klingon is attached to the wildly popular Star Trek franchise, while Láadan appears in three science fiction books by a second-tier author; that Star Trek geeks are the type to get obsessive about silly things like constructed languages, while women in general (considered as half the population) are just as likely to be enthusiastic about football or yoga as langagues; and that learning a language is really, really hard and only obsessive people are liable to do it.