The linguist Howard Karminsky has been celebrated widely for his many contributions to linguistic anthropology and semiotics, though he considers his creation of Seidran, a constructed language (or, more precisely, an engineered language) he devised during the early-1960s, his most significant and durable accomplishment.
Seidran, which features 36 consonants and 9 vowels, verb inflections derived from a cluster of Pacific coast Native American languages, and a vaguely Ethiopic script, is spoken by no one. Even Karminsky finds it unwieldy and cannot converse in Seidran, though he aspires for its employment by scientists, artists, and philosophers as a vehicle to advance the quality and precision of their expression. Seidran is thus an implicit attempt by Karminsky to demonstrate the validity of Whorfianism, the contested presumption that language largely—perhaps entirely—determines thought. “I realized early on while creating Seidran,” Karminsky writes in the forward to his lengthy pamphlet on the language, “that what I was devising would be less a tool of daily communication than a method of enhancing the clarity of thought itself. Creative and investigative endeavors will, I believe, occur at a more profound depth if conducted within the context of Seidran because it compels the user to focus and purify their concepts.”
Karminsky, who was born in the Nova Scotian capital of Halifax in 1927, is an identical twin. He and his brother shared a private language (an inordinately common phenomenon among twins, whether identical or fraternal) until they were three. This recollection remained hidden from Karminsky’s memory for years. His mother, who left him, his brother, and her husband when Karminsky was eight to join a Molokan community in Los Angeles, informed him of the fact by letter in the late-1940s. Karminsky’s father, the owner of a small necktie factory, was an Esperanto enthusiast who claimed to have met L.L. Zamenhof at the World Esperanto Congress in San Francisco in 1915.
After graduating from the University of Toronto with a degree in Classical Studies, Karminsky enrolled at Emmanuel College with plans to earn a Master of Theology degree. A second-term encounter with the uncertain Ottoman Turkish artifact Balaibalan, reputed to be one of the oldest known constructed languages, catalyzed a fascination with languages for Karminsky, who eventually earned his doctorate in Linguistics at Queen’s University in Kingston, where he has taught for over three decades.
“Balaibalan was the key for me,” Karminsky has written. “It arose in a Sufi milieu and most likely was spoken only by a select group and for ceremonial functions exclusively. The notion of a sort of holy language used for an exalted purpose and by a privileged community was something I found exhilarating.”
Seidran, which Karminsky has continued to refine since he established its fundamentals in 1964, was assembled from an array of abstruse sources: the complex morphology of verbs in the nearly-extinct Northwest Caucasian language of Ubykh; the ergative case constructions of Kalaallisut from Greenland; the aspectual distinctions foremost in Tokelauan, a Polynesian language; and the prepositional oddities of the obscure Mayan language, Chʼortiʼ. The predominant principles of Karminsky’s creation are accuracy, concision, and capaciousness: Seidran aims to allow for the most terse and direct expression of any notion that might possibly be conceived, an ambition both hubristic and superb.
The name “Seidran” was arrived at by Karminsky in homage to the spiritual discipline Seidranism, of which he was a practitioner until renouncing the sect’s loosely Platonic mysticism for his mother’s Molokan faith following a nervous collapse in 1971. He has made no secret of his enrollment as a member of the Lisbon Circle, to which he was accepted in 1974, and has suggested Seidran has undergone steady if slow adoption by the group, though it is unclear if it is used as an aid to thought, a secret tongue, or both.
The mathematician Armen Kazanjian, who died two years ago, was convinced Seidran would not only transform scientific disciplines by distilling sprawling thought to single words but would also allow for the revelation of ideas as yet unconceived. This seems undeniable. Karminsky has offered the word “zk’azil-d’ba-xa’mn” as an example. He writes that its definition is: “An effect that precedes its cause in the context of a ritual enacted by a person fortified not by personal animus but, rather, obligation.”
Sembla Intelligencer, June 11, 1988