Yes, I think Pravic is plausible. [Pravic would not, of course, be entirely successful, but the ways in which anarchism would not be successful is kind of (one of) the point(s) of the novel, so...]
zompist wrote: ↑Fri Dec 14, 2018 4:46 am
Conlangs do pretty well in sf-land. There's a few futures with Esperanto, there's Laadan, Heinlein's Mike spoke Loglan, and the Culture speaks a conlang, Marraine. Sf authors apparently feel that adopting a conlang is a futuristic thing to do.
It's usually unrealistic; but I think the scenario of colonisation is actually perhaps the place where it's most plausible - small communities from diverse backgrounds strongly motivated by the desire to form a new society seem like the ideal environment for new language adoption.
* the settlers come from a wide variety of lands, so there is no common or dominant language
That's probably the case, yes.
* they aren't allowed to (or choose not to) settle in national ghettos, so they have to work out some interlanguage
That's probably the case, yes. At least at the time of the novel, there are also some extreme enmities between nations, which would reduce the extent to which they spoke each other's language (by the time of the novel, Urras is basically in the middle of the Cold War). Although iirc that may have developed after the settlement?
* perhaps Pravic was already in wide use as an interlanguage
* and/or Pravic is a simplification of the language the best anarchist books are written in
AIR, Pravic was invented by Odo, the founder of anarchism, who is treated as tantamount to a religious prophet by the anarchists; I'm sure she didn't mostly write in it (because then she'd have had no audience...), but some of her later writings may be in it. I guess we're talking about the sort of scenario where Karl Marx invents Esperanto, and Lenin pushes for its broad adoption - it would be used as a secret society language before the Bolsheviks come to power, and as a state language after that. [or maybe i'm wrong, and it's only Odo's followers who invent it. Even so, it would still be 'Lenin declares that Esperanto is needed to fulfil the promise of Marxism'...]
* they really take their culture-independence seriously, so they're willing to teach all kids Pravic
They absolutely do, yes. They're very ideological about Pravic.
* maybe they're ultra-conscious of the dominance of some Urrasian language, so highly motivated to counter it
Don't think that's specifically the case?
* to provide motivation, all your health care forms are in Pravic
Yes. The thing about Anarres is that although it's anarchist, it's also an authoritarian and constrictive society. Anyone failing to use Pravic would be publically castigated and ultimately ostracised as a counter-revolutionary.
I think the five things to bear in mind with Pravic are:
- the original settler community is very small
- they're ideologically fanatical
- they believe Pravic is central to their desired culture
- they exert strong social control over one another (and to some degree have to, due to the hostility of their environment)
- there are few if any migrants after the initial settlement, and communication between the two worlds is extremely limited and regulated
I do find it believable that the first generation taught Pravic to their children, that the second generation discouraged the continued use of the language of the monopolists (which would be both ideologically reactionary AND would be divisive in a community in which Pravic was the only lingua franca), and the third generation would only learn Pravic. After that, with no exposure to the languages of Urras other than the occasional science textbook, nobody other than academics would learn anything other than Pravic, so the question would disappear.
I think it's worth pointing out, as well, that conlangs DID take off. The auxlang movement was big and fashionable around 1900 - it 'failed' because a) the community rapidly schismed, with no agreement on which language to learn, and b) it failed to be connected to any broader ideological current, beyond a vague internationalism. Even so, Volapuk drew a million learners in just a few years, and millions can still speak some Esperanto. That's tiny compared to the goal of conquering the world, but it's pretty big compared to the number of people needed to found a colony! And then imagine if Esperanto had been invented not by Zamenhof but by Karl Marx, or by Lenin...
Oh, and one other small point: the people who speak Pravic aren't humans.
(Planets with single languages are however one of those sf ideas that are already out of date. I know, English is still growing; but good-enough real-time machine translation is already here. Let it mature for fifty years, pop it in your neurimplant, and who needs an auxlang?)
I think this is too dogmatic. I do see your point, that single-language planets aren't inevitable. But I don't see that they're implausible, either. The people of rural Yorkshire don't need a neurimplant to understand standard English - they already do. But that hasn't stopped them gradually abandoning their dialect. Language shift isn't driven solely by the need to understand others, but also by the need to project a certain cultural image. Large, wealthy languages are likely to continue to exert a considerable cultural attraction. It's not that people will need to learn a language to understand others - but they'll still be drawn to learn a language to
show that they can speak it, and speak it well. The same way young children in England often try out American accents to sound cool - and that's in a monolingual country with its own powerful media. If everyone has neurimplants, it should be easier to learn prestigious languages - at which point, why continue to speak the less prestigious ones? They would survive for a while as family languages - but when a language is associated only with your parents, that can be a reason NOT to learn it. It's unlikely you'd ever have a planet where no other language but one is ever spoken... but I think it's perfectly plausible to have one where it at least looks like a 'one language planet' to a casual observer.
And that's assuming that everyone's OK with just inserting computer chips into their brains, which is plausible but hardly certain.
There's also the possibility, with independent worlds (i.e. those not settle from the future of this Earth), that a global language simply develops before neurimplants do. Consider the success of European languages around the world... and of Mandarin in China... and now imagine that it had been China, rather than Europe, that had conquered the world, and that everyone who today speaks English, French, Portuguese, Spanish or Russian, as well as everyone who today speaks Mandarin, spoke Mandarin... it doesn't seem implausible that one language could in this way come to completely dominate a planet.
To be clear, I'm not saying your scenario, with everyone preserving their ancestral languages out of an ideological pride in their heritage, despite being able to speak more 'popular' languages if they want to, is implausible. It's not, at all, it's very believable. But I can't see the alternative as implausible either...
It's more or less the same trope as Pravic in play. 
