In the Land of INVENTED LANGUAGES (27 page)

Many people were attracted to the idea that if you could control your language, you could control your mind and solve your problems. (The idea still has some popularity today, in the form of moneymaking self-help ventures like Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a descendant of general semantics.) And they took seriously the warnings about language and mind control coming from the new literature of dystopia. In Ayn Rand's
Anthem
, published in 1938, citizens of a futuristic collective society cannot conceive of their own individuality, because they lack the pronoun “I.” In George Orwell's 1984 (first published in 1949), a totalitarian
state controls its subjects through the imposition of Newspeak—people who are denied words for subversive thoughts are rendered incapable of thinking those thoughts.

Poor language. People had always been blaming one thing or another on it, but in the 1930s and 1940s it really took a beating. Before that, in the Esperanto era, language was accused of turning people against each other. The problem was that it prevented mutual understanding, and the solution was to invent or choose a language that everyone could understand. In the post-Esperanto era, language was being accused of everything from genocide to tooth decay. Now the problem with language was its dangerous grip on thought. But what was the solution? Not to invent a new language. No one took that idea seriously anymore. Proposals like Blissymbolics were laughed right out of the arena. (Bliss described a response he received from a prominent general semanticist as “not nice at all”) This time, the solution was to bring language into line with reality, to polish the grime and the rust off the tools, teach people how to use them properly, and put them into service for the truth.

But leaving aside the question of how the truth was to be determined, where exactly was this grime and rust? And how was it to be removed? There were differences of opinion, of course. Ogden had a problem with abstract words posing as truly meaningful words—“fictions” like “causation” and “political” mimicked the behavior of good solid words like “chair” and “red.” The key was to stick to the good solid words. But for Korzybski “chair” and “red” were just as big a part of the problem; the key was to constantly remind ourselves that there was no such thing as a chair (only chair
₁
, chair
₂
, chair
₃
, chair
₃
as I experienced it in 1934, chair
₃
as I experience it now, and so on) and that red was only a subjective individual experience of a certain wavelength of light.

For Orwell (as expressed in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”), the villains were tired metaphors, long, fancy words, and passive verbs.

Though critics took issue with the various cures proposed for the language disease, no one really questioned the original diagnosis: language was a bad influence on thought. But in the 1950s scholars began to look more closely at that background assumption. Fields like psychology, anthropology, and sociology had picked up the machinery of the hard sciences—empirical observation, measurement, experiment—and were figuring out ways to apply it to the “soft” areas of human behavior: mind, meaning, culture. When it came to the matter of human thought, and what may or may not be influencing it, a modern social scientist had two choices: (1) reject all discussion of “thought” as unscientific, because it was impossible to observe directly (the stance of behavioral psychology, which was having a heyday); or (2) find a way to test your hypothesis using cold, hard data. Sitting in your armchair and musing about words and thought was no longer an acceptable option.

At the same time, the language/thought question was getting fresh attention in academic circles with the posthumous re-publication of the papers of Benjamin Whorf. Whorf had been a chemical engineer, working as an inspector at a fire insurance company, when he began studying linguistics as a hobby. He went on to work with the anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir and to produce highly respected studies of Native American languages. Though Whorf's papers were published in the premier journals and he was granted an honorary fellowship at Yale, he was still something of an outsider. His primary employment remained at the insurance company, and he never completed an advanced degree. There was also a religious or spiritual angle to
some of his linguistic investigations (he was a follower of the eccentric Theosophy movement) that made many of his academic contacts uncomfortable. His ideas about the influence of language on thought made them even more uncomfortable, as they seemed dangerously close to the fashionable language polemics about “the tyranny of words” floating around out there among the linguistically naive masses.

But Whorf (though perhaps naive in other ways) was not linguistically naive. His ideas about language and thought were informed by a highly technical and sophisticated understanding of the grammatical structure of languages that were very different from any European language. He saw what he called “the new, and for the most part probably misguided interest in semantics” as marred by the “parochial viewpoint to which ‘language’ means simply ‘English,’” and he tried to dissociate himself from the “various popular bromides about the misleading nature of words.”

He began to formulate his ideas about the relationship of thought to language when, after finally piecing together a grammatical description of Hopi (an Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Arizona), he realized that he knew how to form plurals but not how to use them. It was like knowing that the English plural is formed by es when a word ends in an “s” sound, but not knowing that it's inappropriate to refer to a pile of rice as “rices.” He realized that “the category of plural in Hopi was not the same thing as in English, French or German. Certain things that were plural in these languages were singular in Hopi.” For example, something like “day” could not be pluralized in Hopi, because days were experienced one at a time; they could not be assembled into an objective group that could be observed all at once—a Hopi criterion for pluralness. Whorf connected this observation to other
features of the language that suggested the Hopi experience of time was not the same as it was for a speaker of an SAE (Standard Average European) language. Could it be that a different way of categorizing things in language reflected a different way of categorizing things in the world?

He never got a chance to fully explore the question. He died of cancer in 1941, at the age of forty-four. He left behind a number of papers on the topic—some published, some unpublished, some written for experts and some for lay audiences—that served as the basis for what came to be called the Whorfian hypothesis (or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). The science-minded scholars of the 1950s reinterpreted Whorf's incomplete and complicated exploration of various issues having to do with language, thought, and culture as an empirically testable claim, hence the Whorfian “hypothesis.”

The closest Whorf himself ever got to a hypothesis-style statement was a description of his “linguistic relativity principle,” which held that “users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.” As to what exactly he meant by that, well, there are about as many interpretations as there are mentions of Whorf's name in print. In any case, this statement is a long way from saying that abstract nouns or passive verbs or words like “is” are conspiring to gang up on us and steal our good sense. Whorf's ideas were definitely fertilized by the language-fearing times in which he lived, but his formulation of the language/thought question was the most sensitive to the complicated way in which language actually works and the most
attractive to the social scientists who decided to take up the question in the 1950s.

It proved very difficult to come up with a scientific test of the Whorfian hypothesis. Suppose you compared two groups of people who spoke different languages, and you found some kind of difference between the groups. How would you know it was the language that caused that difference? Perhaps it was from a difference in culture. Perhaps it was the culture that shaped the language, and not the other way around. Every language was attached to a culture, and there was no way to separate one thing from the other. This was one of the problematic issues that came up when a group of top linguists, psychologists, and philosophers got together for a conference on the Whorfian hypothesis in 1953. The papers from the conference were published in a book called
Language in Culture
, and soon every field that touched on language and human behavior was buzzing about it.

A sociologist named James Cooke Brown, who had just taken a position at the University of Florida in Gainesville, was paying close attention. In the winter of 1955, when classes let out for the holidays, he “sat down before a bright fire to commence what I hoped would be a short paper on the possibility of testing the social psychological implications of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.” He wanted to show that “the construction of a tiny model language, with a grammar borrowed from the rules of modern logic, taught to subjects of different nationalities in a laboratory setting under conditions of control, would permit a decisive test.” If the problem with the Whorfian hypothesis experiment was that
natural
languages couldn't be disentangled from the cultures in which they were spoken, then why not avoid the problem by using an
artificial
language? This “tiny model language” became Loglan (from
logical language
), a project that would occupy the rest of
Brown's life. It would grow large enough to be used for original poetry, translations of works like
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
, and, in one case, a proposal of marriage. It would bring Brown fame and disappointment, admirers and enemies, and a trip to federal court over the question of who rightfully owns a language—the man who invented it or the people who use it?

A Formula
for Success

I
n 1960, Brown published a sketch of Loglan in
Scientific American
. This was an amazing coup for a language inventor. In a post-utopian, postwar world, where no one even deigned to
laugh
at new language projects anymore, it was incredible that a major periodical would treat an invented language seriously enough to devote ten pages to it.

Brown had found a way to make language invention respectable by treating his creation with scientific detachment. He didn't say his language would stop war and heal the world; he presented it merely as an instrument for testing a specific hypothesis. He didn't crow about how easy it was to learn; he computed a “learnability score” for each word (based on how many sounds in the word overlapped with the sounds for that word in different natural languages) and proposed that the
correlation between learnability scores and actual learnability could be tested in the lab. He didn't make wild claims about the profound and life-altering effects his language would have on thought; he demurred that he was “by no means certain yet that Loglan is a thinkable language, let alone a thought-facilitating one.” His approach, humble, rational, and unemotional, was nothing like the idealistic flights of foolishness that people had come to expect from language inventors. If you wanted to get any attention for your invented-language project in 1960, scientific detachment was definitely the way to go.

Another language called Interlingua tried to adopt a similar approach in the 1950s and 1960s, and got a little bit of success in return. Interlingua was created by a committee called the International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA), which had been founded by Alice Vanderbilt Morris in 1924. The original goal of the association was to promote intelligent and objective discussion of competing invented languages and to encourage scholarly research into the matter of determining both the best form for an auxiliary language and the best uses for it. It was a meeting ground for the high-prestige language inventors and other professionals who were interested in the international language idea (linguists such as Edward Sapir, Morris Swadesh, Roman Jakobson, and André Martinet). Activity fell off in the 1930s and was further disrupted by the war, but the organization survived and ultimately published its own committee-designed Interlingua in 1951.

The first Interlingua periodical was
Spectroscopia Molecular
, a monthly overview of international work in … molecular spectroscopy. (It involves shooting energy at something in order to see what does or doesn't bounce back—physicists, chemists, and astronomers do it.) Next came a newsletter,
Scientia International
,
a digest of the latest goings-on in the world of science. Interlingua positioned itself as a way for scientists of different language backgrounds to keep up with their fields. They wouldn't even necessarily have to speak the language. As long as they understood it, it would fulfill its businesslike function. By attaching itself to science, and refraining from grand claims, Interlingua spread a little further than it otherwise might have. Some major medical congresses and journals published abstracts in Interlingua throughout the 1950s and 1960s. But it failed to sustain interest. Interlingua was another one of those Greco-Latin least common denominator languages, and if you were interested in those kinds of things, you were probably already doing Esperanto. Everyone else just wasn't interested in those kinds of things, science oriented or not.