Láadan archive update: Why a Woman Is Not Like a Physicist

Rachel Wil Sha Singh

A while back, I had printed out the talk that Suzette Haden Elgin had given at WisCon 1982, prior to creating Láadan. I had intended to start working on a “documentary” about the history of Láadan and Suzette’s work.

Upon looking for this again, I found that the current WisCon site does NOT have it available. The site didn’t even have it in the Wayback Machine! But, upon further research, they had changed their URL at some point, and I was able to find the talk using the Wayback Machine and that old URL.

This is now under the Láadan Archives page, and I will also post the talk text in this blog post as well, so that there is at least a redundancy so people in the future can find it more easily.

PDF download link: http://ayadan.moosader.com/archive/wiscon6hadenelgin.pdf




Why a Woman Is Not Like a Physicist: WisCon 6, March 6 1982

I’m going to talk about realities here. Heaven knows, the one we’ve got is very odd, but let’s not talk about that. Let’s consider instead what a reality is.

For the ameba it may be something quite different, because the ameba apparently experiences reality directly, without any sort of filters intervening. Human beings
don’t do that. We experience reality through a number of cognitive and perceptual filters, filters that protect us from a kind of overload on our circuits; and then we express that perception of reality as a set of statements.

So, for the human being, reality is simply a set of statements. A culture develops when some group agrees that a particular shared set of statements—its consensus set—represents the real world. Our current American set contains statements like the following:

* Ronald Reagan was a movie actor.
* Mountains are higher than plains.
* The gods don’t give you three chances
* Nobody cares about straight seams anymore.

And so on. A common term for such sets is “paradigm,” but it has connotations of regularity and elegance that “set” does not. For the most part, I will be using the
more neutral term.

Within a culture there will be specialized subsets of statements. There might be a set for the hunter, one for the wine taster, one for the ballerina, etc., and these subsets aren’t always meaningful to the non-specialist. But unless the specialist is will is willing to accept all or almost all of the statements in the consensus set, that
specialist cannot really be part of the culture. That’s a problem that physicists have right now: they have trouble finding anyone else to talk to. But physicists are privileged in that they can talk to one another, they know
what it is they want to talk about, and they know in what way their attempts at communication differ from the statements of the consensus set (or derived from those in the consensus set). Women don’t have all that luxury
available to them. I’ll explain that as I go along.

Now, George Miller has said that, if you want to understand what somebody says, you have to assume it is true and then try to imagine what it is true of. He is
saying: for human beings, you have to assume that what they say is true and then try to imagine what set of reality statements they would have to subscribe to in order that such a thing could be true. An illustration will help. We have all encountered the unhelpful librarian. In order to understand and communicate with the librarian whose primary utterance seems to be “Oh, you can’t check out
that book,” you must assume that it is true—that you cannot in fact check out that book—and you will find that the set of statements to which that librarian sub-
scribes includes not “A library is a place from which books are distributed as widely as possible,” but rather “A library is a place where books are kept, in perfect order.” In the context of that second statement, that piece of reality, taking books out of the library is not something the librarian wants to see happen. You need the same strategy when you are told that you must do something perfectly idiotic because “It’s required”; you’ll get nowhere claiming that it isn’t. You must assume that indeed it is required and then try to imagine the set of statements that would allow anything so idiotic to be true. If you can enter the reality of the person imposing the requirement by using one of his or her reality statements, you may have some hope of communicating.

Nowadays, we learn about realities primarily from the media, and I use that term in the sense that Marshall McLuhan used it, although I’ll be concentrating here on
the mass-communication media of television, film and
print. I will refer to the set of statements which constitutes consensus reality as C.

Gene Youngblood has said that no medium, in order to preserve a particular reality (including C) is obliged to say anything nice about it, or to argue for it, or to support it, or to do anything like that. All that a medium has to do to preserve a given reality is to present no alternative. If you have never known that there was anything edible except fried chicken and Brussels sprouts, you are
not going to want strawberries. All that television, or any of the visual or print media, has to do to support C is simply to continue to present it, as if there were no other possibility. The media can even argue against it, so long as all they do is present in detail those things against which they argue rather than an alternative.

In this context, the question, “What do women really want?” ceases to be a catch phrase. It may not be a question that can be answered within ordinary frames of
reference. A woman can only express what she really wants in the form of statements of language that she uses; an then you must imagine what those statements could be true of. And, at that moment, although a woman may have the feeling that there’s something very wrong with the reality she’s got, and may be able to express in crucifying detail every aspect of that reality,[1] that does not necessarily help her answer the question. She would have to be able to tell
you what it was that she would prefer in place of the reality she’s got, you see.

Science fiction, including SF fantasy, has offered women an extraordinary opportunity—the potential to present alternative models of reality for other women to examine. The function of a model like that is first of all to make the fish aware they are in water, and secondly to suggest that there is somewhere else they might prefer to be. Up to now, women have used science fiction for this purpose in two ways. First, they have described an alternative reality, M, a matriarchy. C says “Women are subordinate to men.” M says “Women are not subordinate to men; men are subordinate to women.” Formally, “the feature +[ MALE ] is rewritten as the feature +[ FEMALE ] in the context POWER .” Second, women have presented androgyny (Reality A) as an alternative reality. A says
“Women are not subordinate to men, and men are not subordinate to women; they are equal.” Formally, “The set of features +[ MALE ] and =[ FEMALE ] is rewritten as null in the context of POWER .”

Please note that formally neither one of these amounts to much of a change. Formally. Formally, a set of statements is a linear list.[2] In the real world, however, and inside the human mind, the set of statements that
constitutes C is a dynamic network, an equilibrium. And making a change in any statement in the set, even a very small change, affects every other statement in the set.

The women who have been exploring M and A have been making one small change, as a way of exploring what might happen. And it may very well be that other women, reading those models, reading those descriptions of alternative realities will say, “Aha! That is what I always wanted and I never knew it until now!” I am not putting down either of these alternatives.

But there’s a third alternative (which is, of course, nameless), which I will call Reality O.[3] O says “Women are neither subordinate to men nor superior to men, nor equal to men; they are radically different from men.” That’s O, the strange reality of the third kind, which so far as I know has never been done in science fiction or anywhere else.

At which point, the question is “Why not?” It is the obvious third alternative, however strange it may be; what hasn’t it been done?

There are a couple of major reasons.

Ordinarily when you want to construct an alternative reality—or even an alternative place of a reality—you use the mechanism of metaphor. A metaphor is a set of statements that constitutes a limited reality, L. There are many possible Ls, and none of them matches C, but all of them are sufficiently like C in a sufficient number of ways so that people can imagine what reality the set of statements in L would be true of, because they can establish links between L and C.

From the perception of one concrete object—a toilet, say—you can immediately infer a whole set of other concrete objects, such as walls and floors and a door that locks.[4] In the same way, from one statement in a metaphor you can infer all the rest of the statements. In the same way, from one statement in a metaphor you can infer all the rest of the statements. The metaphor of the Old West has become encoded, embedded in American culture, so that if you hear that LOW contains the statement “Cowboys never mistreat their horses,” you can immediately infer that it also contains “All women who run saloons have hearts of gold” and “Whatever there is, there’s always more of it.” You can get vast numbers of Americans moving just by shouting, “Wagons, ho!”[5]

Using the mechanism of metaphor, M says “Woman reality is like man reality, except that the gender values are reversed.” A uses the mechanism of metaphor to say “Woman reality is like man reality, except that the gender values are irrelevant.” O says “Woman reality is not like man reality at all” and it then becomes obligated to provide a whole, and wholly new, set of statements,
indeed, those statements which would represent Reality O. And it is right there that women run into great difficulty; it’s right there that you find the unrealized potential of science fiction. Because the only mechanism that is available to us for the expression of our perceptions of reality is language. And the only language available to women is one constructed by men, shaped by men, and controlled by men, from its earliest beginnings. We have no record of any other sort of language, ever, not in any society in the history of the world. If there ever was one, it is lost forever.

There is, for one thing, no vocabulary—no lexicon—available. There is not even a name, remember, for Reality O, as there is for A (androgyny) and M (matriarchy).

Consider, please, the incredible proliferation of vocabulary items that exist for the discussion of weaponry. A ‘weapon’; that’s a name, but it won’t do. The
slightest, the tiniest, difference in the physical characteristics of any weapon entitles it to an entirely new name of its own.[6]
Menstruation, however—an experience of crucial importance to women—has only one word, and it’s almost impossible to pronounce the damned thing within the sound system of English. That there might be various experiences of menstruation, with different characteristics, is not allowed for; there is no vocabulary available. You need a vocabulary if you are going to construct a set of statements that represents a new reality.

And that is not the only problem. You see, any time that you use a language, you bring in, along with its vocabulary and its syntax, all of its presuppositions—all of the things that every utterance of that language means, whether it is present in the surface shape of the utterance or not.

Thus, one of the statements of man reality is, “No experience supported only by introspection constitutes valid evidence.” And so you say, “Aha! In my woman reality, any experience supported only by introspection constitutes valid evidence!” But the moment you say that you are perforce including and accepting a statement from man reality: “The validity of an experience as evidence is determined, at least in part, by the presence or absence of introspection as its only support.” And you can’t get away from that; it is build into the language, providing a quite different sort of support for those who wish to claim that patriarchy—the status quo—is the only ‘natural’ arrangement.[7]

So far, women have only been able to write science fiction using male vocabulary, male syntax, male semantics, and male presuppositions. So far, it has not been possible for women to take full advantage of science fiction as a medium in which to present O for the examination of other women. Unlike the physicists, women do not know at precisely what points it is that their reality might differ from C, nor at what points in the set of statements the differences occur; furthermore, they can’t even discuss this conveniently with one another.

It’s all very well to say, “Oh, all right, we will abandon language! We will use the dance, sculpture, painting, instrumental music, the arts …” Unfortunately in our culture that is of very little use in terms of bringing about change. The fine arts are not media-available to
most women. They are accessible only to the upperclass, elite, highly educated women who are relatively comfortable and who have no strong motivation to make real changes in the status quo. They are not available to the women for whom the part of C represented by country music and Harlequin romances constitutes the real world. And so long as that is true, statements about reality made outside language and through the arts are not going to be able to effect change. They will not be accessible to the vast majority of women, who will not be able to look at them or listen to them and say, “Oh, that’s just what I always wanted, if I had only known!” For thewoman who is on her feet all day long six days a week as a clerk at Woolworth’s, and who goes home at night to take care of three kids, and who spends every Sunday getting ready to do that all over again for six more days, the only medium available I language. That is perhaps the reason that some feminists have been saying that the single most essential task facing women is the construction of a new language. In this new language, SF could be written and understood by all women. The question is: “Can we do that, and, if so, how?”

George Leonard has said, “…Beware. Any serious attempt at including unfamiliar phenomena in a certain verbal realm may change reality as perceived within that realm.”[8] Beware, he says, and he is quite right. For example, it is certain that those women—and men—who have used science fiction as a vehicle for the description of M and A have thereby changed reality as we know it, just enough, to allow us a glimpse of O.

Nevertheless, to perceive O is one thing; to write about it, to describe it so that others may perceive it, is another. A vocabulary must be created, and a syntax, and all the rest. I propose to talk only about the stage of creating vocabulary, but what I say should be understood to represent a strategy for use at all levels of the task. The clue that got me past the I-don’t-know-how-to-do-it stage is in Douglas Hofstadter’s magnificent science fiction work, [9] Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, on page 73. He says, “When we are dealing with an infinite set to start with … the holes created by removing some subset may be very hard to define in any explicit way.” That sentence, for me, was like the water in Archimede’s bathtub. I had only to take meta-reality as my ‘infinite set,’ and I could see where to go and how to proceed. But, because I am not male, I am not quite so taken by the idea that removing chunks from an infinity is going to leave holes in it; I think we can set that aside and consider matter as follows.

The task: After men have taken a chunk here and a chunk there out of meta-reality, and have given the chunks names and decreed that the chunks are reality and they are all there is, how do we go about expressing our perception of what they have left behind?

Meta-reality is a whole and undifferentiated substance, a seamless infinite unity. Upon this substance, human beings impose differentiations, using cognition and perception as mechanisms for ‘finding’ them and language as a mechanism for expressing them. This process carves figures out of the semantic ground; suddenly we ‘discover’ that those figures are ‘there.’ Naming them is a major function of language.[10] I am taking it as a given that all humans, male or female, have access to the same meta-reality. This is not trivial, by the way; I want that to be clear. But it is necessary if the hypothesis is to be explored.

If female perceptions really are different, the only place to search for them is in the ground, i.e., in what has been left behind when the males established, and named, the figures. The finest discussion of this figure/ground distinction is of course in Gödel, Escher, Bach, to which I refer you without reservation. The most accessible example of perceiving ground as figure is the world of Escher; it’s easier to draw my examples from there than to try to take them from Bach because, although almost everyone can ‘read’ figures, not everyone can read music.[11]

In the Escher works that allow us to perceive ground as figure, and vice versa, we find two primary types:

The ground is a reversal of the figure (e.g., the figure is black crabs and the ground is white crabs [M.C. Escher’s Crab Canon]) The ground is not just the figure with some distinctive feature (e.g., color) reversed, it is something completely different (e.g., the figure is fishes and the ground is birds [M.C. Escher’s Sky and Water]).

Notice that in Type 2, the something-completely-different is always the same thing throughout the work, and it is chosen from the set of things already named. Notice than in both Types 1 and 2 we have fixed-pair relationships, one-to-one. You would find this true of the Bach works that allow us the same type of perception; for example, you would find it in the fugues. And in Bach you find the analog of Escher’s gradual transformations of ground into figure into ground; in Back this is done by modulations.

I have said that a new language for women must be searched for in the ground. And it pleases me that ‘ground’ has its other, usual meaning: the earth beneath our feet, the living soil. It is an appropriate place for women to search and no only because we are so often closer to it than men.

If what we find in our search is simply the reversal of what men have found, the formally our new language will be simply made. We can just call everything identified by man reality [thing]m, and everything on our new woman reality becomes [thing]f . The [fish]m of male reality becomes the [fish]f of woman reality, reversed for some distinctive feature.12 In Escher, the reversed feature is color; for our new language, perhaps our sexual gender. This is easy to do formally; it is a single formal operation, applied everywhere. It would be more difficult pragmatically, since the differentiating feature may not be conveniently encoded for us in existing language. That is, [brother]f is already encoded for us as ‘sister,’ but we have no lexicalization for [tree]f or [freedom]f. But we can imagine how it would be done, and we can talk about it.

The next possibility—that women will perceive not just figure-reversal but something different—is again formally simple. Formally, man reality’s [fish] becomes woman reality’s [FISH], and so on for every perception.[13] However, the problems imposed by present language and logic become greater, for now the term [FISH] includes everything that is not [fish]. Thus, in current logic and language, [FISH], [TREE], [BROTHER], ad infinitum, are synonymous. The language would turn everything women perceived back into undifferentiated ground.

One way out of this is Escher’s Type 2 schema: fish:figure::bird:ground, always paired like that. The pairings could be quite arbitrary (like the pairings of upside down walbiri) but would be fixed pairs. Each encoded perception women would take from the ground would have to be given a name by those women. And it is possible to imagine how this would be done and possible to talk about it.

Notice, please, that in simple reversal (from [thing]m to [thing]f ) the man perception dictates the form of the woman perception; this is what happens in LI, which is one possible expression of such a reversal. In the second system (from [thing] to [THING]) neither perception determines the other; they are mutually codetermined. The fish is there because its form makes the bird; the bird is there because its form makes the fish; neither is dominant. A is one way of expressing this alternative. And both LI and A are fixed pair relations.

There is a third possibility, the one in which what is found in ground and is made into figure in woman language does not exist in fixed-pair relationship—either simple reversal or any other—with what male language has already made to be figure, and has encoded as names. (And please don’t be misled by the ‘noun’ connotations of naming in English; the noun/verb distinction happens to be a perception after it has been encoded as a word.) This alternative can be imagined, but only by constant vigilance. The pull of the patriarchal paradigm is almost irresistible; you keep ‘discovering’ fixed-pair relations as your brain scans for pattern.

It may be that this is hard-wired in the human brain. If so, it is inescapable, and the task of forming a women’s language lies in one of the first two alternatives. But I am not willing to take this as a given. First, I am going to do some investigation, now that—thanks to a number of science-fiction writers and Douglas Hofstadter—I know where to search for Reality O. I will let you know what I find.[14]


[1] See, for example, Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room.

[2] It is, of course, possible to impose hierarchy upon that linearity, but the formalization quickly becomes indecipherable if any attempt is made to achieve adequacy.

[3] “X,” “Y,” “Z,” “Q,” “W,” and “R” are the male variables; let’s use “O” this time.

[4] Especially a door that locks .

[5] President Kennedy, who was our last genuinely successful communicator as a president, understood this very well. He understood that metaphors are efficient metaphors of powers; he called his administration the New Frontier, knowing that from that people would infer such things as “Whatever there is, there’s always more of it,” thus accomplishing a lot of his work for him with ease and dispatch. President Reagan as been trying, but he keeps trying to combine LOW with LBE (the limited reality of the British Empire), and it isn’t working. It would probably be simplest if our politicians would follow the fine example of Stewart Brand and call their administrations “The Last New Frontier,” “The Next Last New Frontier,” “The Latest Next Last New Frontier,” and so on; they have perhaps underestimated the public tolerance.

[6] The New American Roget’s College Thesaurus © 1962 lists 240 words under ‘arms’; many people from the Society of Creative Anachronism could double that list.

[7] The society in my Ozark trilogy is a pseudo-patriarchy, thus no exception.

[8] Sorry that all my quotations are from men.

[9] Yes, GEB is a science fiction work; unlike most SF, it
is heavier on the science than on the fiction. But the incorporation of the dialogs throughout the work places it squarely in our genre and leads us back at last to the undichotomized world of Galileo and all those other writers of dialogs.

[10] This is what we are doing when we ‘see’ things in clouds or open flames or wood grain or ink blots; the difference is vast, since we then find things already perceived and named, but it will do as an analogy.

[11] My math is not strong enough for me to be able to say whether what goes on relative to figure and ground in Escher and Bach is matched in the works of Gödel, but I would assume so based on what I do know and on what Hofstadter has done.

[12] In spoken English, you can pronounce [fish]f as ‘fish-prime.’

[13] In spoken English, you can pronounce [FISH] as ‘un-fish.’

[14] I have two books in progress on the subject set out in this piece; one is a theoretical work, and the other is a novel.


Leonard, George B. November 1974 “Language and Reality” Harper’s pp 46-52.

Miller, George. January 1980. “Giving Away Psychology in the 80’s” (interview by Elizabeth Hall) Psychology Today pp 38-50.

Youngblood, Gene. Winter 1977-78. “The Mass Media and the Future of Desire” Coevolution Quarterly pp 6-17.

Copyright © 1982 Suzette Haden Elgin

Updates to Áya Dan, and Láadan Discord

Rachel Wil Sha Singh


Sooo busy with work!

Well, for the time being I’m just trying to get small things done. I’ve been trying to pull together a cohesive theme across the Áya Dan blog, YouTube channel, Facebook page, and GitHub org. I also felt like we needed some sort of symbol or logo, but I had a really hard time coming up with anything. For now, I just used my giraffe art from “Kial la ĝirafo neniam solas?” t-shirt. 😮


Some other Láadaná started a Discord server for all things Láadan, if you’re interested. I’ve added the link under the Láadan section of this page. The link to join is here: https://discord.gg/3Qms2C


A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan

Rachel Wil Sha Singh

convert_000When I first purchased this book, it was $60 used on Amazon. I carefully unbound it, scanned all the pages (except the dictionary), then re-bound it.

As of writing, I see the cheapest instance of it for sale at $350. That’s a lot.

Suzette passed away at the beginning of 2015. (what would she have thought of the 2016 race and our current U.S. government?)

Even so, this still technically wrong to upload a copy of this book. However, I doubt I will get into legal trouble over this; Myself and another person have tried to reach out to Suzette’s husband and to the publisher of this book, but have not received any response.

In interests of preserving the language, I’ve uploaded the scans I had originally made, in PDF form. This is the full book, except the dictionary in the middle. I might scan these later once I have time, and update this link.


Kuĉjo Fenikso faras videojn!

Rachel Wil Sha Singh

Looking for some more Esperanto vlogs to watch?

During this and next month, Kurt Phoenix is posting weekly videos to the Áya Dan YouTube channel. Here are the first four videos.


Rej & Kuĉjo ĉe la parko por 4a julio (Áya Dan / Esperanto)


La Fundamento de Trovanta Mi Mem per Esperantujo (Malgracia Filmeto)


Vlogo pri poezio (Mi legis mian poemon)


Annabel Lee de Edgar A. Poe Tradukita kaj Legita en Esperanto


If you’re interested in creating content for the Áya Dan channel (in, or about, any conlang), please contact Rachel at Rachel@Moosader.com


People leaving conlangs

Rachel Wil Sha Singh

The main reason I see people leave a community that is based around a specific conlang seems to always be because of other people.

Which, for auxlangs like Esperanto and Ido, is a little bit ironic? Maybe? Since they’re designed to bring people together. But politics (how words should be used, when words should be added, etc.) and the debate (or, more regularly, arguments) for/against really seem to drive people away.

With Esperanto, I see this most with trying to expand vocabulary to add more inclusive terms, people being against that, and the resulting vitriol driving away people – mostly women and LGBTQIA+ people. I have a contact in the Ido world who has made a lot of Ido content who now tells me that they’re leaving because of conflict over words in Ido as well, and someone being toxic about that.

I’ve put a lot of energy into Láadan in hopes of building another type of community, oriented a bit more towards me and mine, but as things grow, it seems that there will inevitably be people leaving no matter what language or what goals are shared by the users of the language.

It’s almost like humans are the reason behind conflict, not what languages they speak. ;P

Áya Dan YouTube channel

Rachel Wil Sha Singh

Screenshot of Áya Dan channel on YouTubeClick here to visit the channel

A bit ago, I set up the Áya Dan YouTube channel, though due to lack of time, did not upload any videos to it. Last night, I migrated my videos from my Esperanto, Ido, and Láadan YouTube channels over here, so there is at least some content now!


The goal of the YouTube channel is the same as the blog:

  • First, to be a collaborative space for people to post about, or in, conlangs.
  • Secondly, Áya Dan is meant to also give a platform to amplify peoples’ voices, especially when it comes to social issues. One of the original blogs that was merged into Áya Dan was “La Aliuloj”, which was started as a LGBTQIA+ Esperanto blog.
  • Third, to build original content around conlangs – not just translations of existing works (though translations and reworkings are somewhat allowed). We want to encourage the creation of unique content from people with various viewpoints and backgrounds.

And, all conlangs are welcome!


Sometimes people send me little news updates and I will post about that, or if someone would like to contribute a one-off blog post or video, we can upload those for you. If you would like to be a regular contributor, and have access to the channel/blog to upload content whenever you have free time, please email me at Rachel@Moosader.com !



Áya Dan YouTube channel

Rachel Wil Sha Singh


It doesn’t have any content uploaded yet, but I’ve created a YouTube channel for Áya Dan. Since multiple people can be set to contribute to a single channel, my hope is that we can get several contributors to post content whenever they have spare time.

I have separate personal channels for each conlang I’ve spent time learning, but with full time work and part time gradschool, I find myself lacking spare time to do much with.

If you’re interested in subscribing, the channel is here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJiwii5O87i8fedse_O06ow (We need 100 subscribers before we can have a custom URL)

And if you’re interested in contributing some work – it can be any kind of work, as long as it is about, or in, a conlang – please reach out to me.