Láadan - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Constructed language

A planned or constructed language—known colloquially as a conlang—is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary has been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved naturally...

created by Suzette Haden Elgin

Suzette Haden Elgin

Suzette Haden Elgin is an American science fiction author. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and is considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages...

in 1982 to test the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...

, specifically to determine if development of a language aimed at expressing the views of women would shape a culture; a subsidiary hypothesis was that Western natural language

Natural language

In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...

s may be better suited for expressing the views of men than women. The language was included in her science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

Native Tongue series. Láadan contains a number of words that are used to make unambiguous statements that include how one feels about what one is saying. According to Elgin, this is designed to counter male-centered language's limitations on women, who are forced to respond "I know I said that, but I meant this".

Tones

Unusually for constructed languages, Láadan is a tonal language

Tone (linguistics)

Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...

. It utilises two distinct tones:

lo /lō/ or /lò/, a short, medium or low tone, represented by a single unmarked vowel
ló /ló/, a short, high tone, represented by a single marked vowel

The word "Láadan" has three syllables: "lá-" with the short vowel /a/ plus high tone; "-a" with the short vowel /a/ and no tone; and "-dan".

Láadan doesn't allow any double [i.e., long] phonemes. Whenever two identical short vowels would occur side by side in a single morpheme, one of them has to be marked for high tone. When adding an affix would result in two identical vowels side by side, an epenthetic /h/ is inserted to prevent the forbidden sequence. The language will allow either "máa" or "maá," but not "maa". These combinations can be described as:

loó /lǒː/, a long, low-rising tone, represented by a double vowel, the second of which is marked
lóo /lôː/, a long, high-falling tone, represented by a double vowel, the first of which is marked

(Some people analyze these tone sequences as tonemic as well, for a total of four tones.)

Elgin prefers an analysis of the language as having no long vowels and a single tone, the high tone (distinguished from "neutral, baseline pitch"), but she acknowledges that linguists using other formalisms would be justified in saying that there are two tones, high and low (or unmarked or mid).

Vowels

Láadan has five vowel

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...

a /ɑ/, an open back unrounded vowel (as English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

calm),
e /ɛ/, an open-mid front unrounded vowel (as English bell),
i /ɪ/, a near-close near-front unrounded vowel (as English bit),
o /o/, a close-mid back rounded vowel (as English home),
u /u/, a close back rounded vowel
Close back rounded vowel
The close back rounded vowel, or high back rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is u....

(as English boon).

Consonants

		Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals...	Dental / Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth...		Postalveolar Postalveolar consonant Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate... / Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...	Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider...
			Central Central consonant A central or medial consonant is a consonant sound that is produced when air flows across the center of the mouth over the tongue. The class contrasts with lateral consonants, in which air flows over the sides of the tongue rather than down its center....	Lateral Lateral consonant A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth....
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...		m /m/	n /n/
Plosive		b /b/	d /d/
Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or...	voiceless		th /θ/	lh /ɬ/	sh /ʃ/	h /h/
	voiced				zh /ʒ/
Rhotic Rhotic consonant In phonetics, rhotic consonants, also called tremulants or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including "R, r" from the Roman alphabet and "Р, p" from the Cyrillic alphabet...			r /r/
Approximant Approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough or with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no...		w /w/		l /l/	y /j/

Láadan lacks the consonant

Consonant

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...

s /p, t, k, ɡ, s/. However, it uses b, d, sh (/ʃ/), m, n, l, r, w, y (/j/), h with the same phonetic value as English. In addition to these, three digraphs

Digraph (orthography)

A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...

require further explanation:

th /θ/, a voiceless dental fricative
Voiceless dental fricative
The voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English speakers as the 'th' in thing. Though rather rare as a phoneme in the world's inventory of languages, it is encountered in some of the most widespread and influential...

(always as in English think, never as then),
zh /ʒ/, a voiced postalveolar fricative
Voiced postalveolar fricative
The voiced palato-alveolar fricative or voiced domed postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is Z. An alternative symbol used in some...

(as English pleasure),
lh /ɬ/, a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative
Voiceless alveolar lateral fricative
The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar fricatives is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is K...

(as Welsh
Welsh language
Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...

llan).

Grammar

Most Láadan sentences contain three particles

Grammatical particle

In grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition...

The speech-act particle this occurs at the beginning of the sentence and marks it as either a statement (bíi), a question (báa), et cetera; in connected speech or writing, this particle is often omitted. They are:

Bíi : Indicates a declarative sentence (usually optional)

Báa : Indicates a question

Bó : Indicates a command; very rare, except to small children

Bóo : Indicates a request; this is the usual imperative/"command" form

Bé : Indicates a promise

Bée : Indicates a warning

The grammatical tense
Grammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...

particle this occurs second in the sentence and marks it as either present tense
Present tense
The present tense is a grammatical tense that locates a situation or event in present time. This linguistic definition refers to a concept that indicates a feature of the meaning of a verb...

(ril), past tense
Past tense
The past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future...

(eril), future tense
Future tense
In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future , or to happen subsequent to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future .-Expressions of future tense:The concept of the future,...

(aril) or hypothetical (wil); without the tense particle, the sentence is assumed to have the same tense as the previous sentence.
The evidence particle this occurs at the end of statements and indicates the trustworthiness of the statement. They are:

wa : Known to speaker because perceived by speaker, externally or internally

wi : Known to speaker because self-evident

we : Perceived by speaker in a dream

wáa : Assumed true by speaker because speaker trusts source

waá : Assumed false by speaker because speaker distrusts source; if evil intent by the source is also assumed, the form is "waálh"

wo : Imagined or invented by speaker, hypothetical

wóo : Used to indicate that the speaker states a total lack of knowledge as to the validity of the matter

Láadan is a verb–subject–object (VSO) language. Verb

Verb

A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...

s and adjective

Adjective

In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....

s are interchangeable. There are no articles

Article (grammar)

An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...

, and the object is marked by the -th or -eth suffix

Suffix

In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...

. The plural

Plural

In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...

number is shown only by the me- prefix to the verb (wo- is used in some versions of the language). The particle ra following a verb makes it negative.

Some basic sentences in Láadan
Láadan	literal translation	idiomatic translation
bíi ril áya mahina wa	statement present-tense beautiful/beautify flower observed-truth	The flower is beautiful
báa eril mesháad with	question past-tense plural-go/come woman	Did the women go/come?
bíi ril lámála with ruleth wa	statement present-tense stroke/caress woman cat-object observed-truth	The woman strokes the cat
bóo wil di le neth	request hypothetical speak/say I you-object	I would like to speak with you, please.
bíi aril meleyan ra lanemid wáa	statement future-tense plural-be-brown negative dog received-truth	I hear the dogs will not be brown

Morphology

Láadan has an agglutinative

Agglutinative language

An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...

morphology

Morphology (linguistics)

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...

, and uses a number of affix

Affix

An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...

es to indicate various feelings and moods that many natural language

Natural language

s can only indicate by tone of voice, body language

Body language

Body language is a form of non-verbal communication, which consists of body posture, gestures, facial expressions, and eye movements. Humans send and interpret such signals almost entirely subconsciously....

or circumlocution.

Affix	meaning	example
(-)lh(-)	disgust or dislike	hahodimi: "pleasantly bewildered"; hahodimilh: "unpleasantly bewildered"
du-	to try to	bíi eril dusháad le wa: "I tried to come"
dúu-	to try in vain to	bíi eril dúusháad le wa: "I tried in vain to come"
ná-	progressive aspect	bíi eril dúunásháad le wa: "I was trying in vain to come"
-(e)tha	natural possessor	lalal betha: "her mother's milk"
-(e)tho	customary or legal possessor	ebahid letho: "my husband"
-(e)thi	possessor by chance	losh nethi: "your money (gambling winnings)"
-(e)the	possessor by unknown provenance	ana worulethe: "the cats' food"
-id	denotes male (otherwise female or gender neutral)	thul: "mother/parent"; thulid: "father"

The speech act particle, at the beginning of a sentence, can also carry several suffixes, which expand on the overall state of the sentence. For example, bíi begins a statement, but bíide begins a statement that is part of a narrative; bóoth begins a request made in pain; báada begins a question that is meant in jest.

Pronouns

Pronoun

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...

s in Láadan are built up from a number of constituent parts. The consonant l marks the first person

Grammatical person

Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...

, n the second person and b the third person. Usually, these are followed by the vowel e. However, the vowel a is used to designate someone who is loved (lhe- is prefixed to describe someone who is despised). The suffix -zh is used to mark a plural pronoun for numbers up to four, and -n for numbers beyond that. Therefore, lazh means "we, several beloved", and lheben means "they, many despised".

External links

Official Láadan website
Láadan Conlang Profile
Elgin's Láadan introduction
Láadan lessons (moderately paced lessons in Láadan)
A Láadan Sampler
Some Láadan (PDF) (The text says that "wo-" is a plural marker. This is an error; the plural marker is "me-", "wo-" is a relativizer.)
Lesson One of Láadan Made Easier
Láadan Working Group
How to count in Láadan

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