Zompist Bboard Again

In case you haven't read The Dispossessed, the backstory of that book is that anarchists from the suspiciously Earthlike planet Urras go establish an Utopian colony on the conveniently inhabitable moon Urras.
In the process, they decide to adopt Pravic, a conlang designed, roughly, on anarcho-syndicalist specs. (One example given is that it has no possessive pronouns.)

It's not terribly important to the plot, as I recall, but by the time the story starts it's pretty clear that everybody on Urras is speaking Pravic.

I'd love to have your opinion on whether the idea is plausible at all... I'm not really interested in whether Pravic would work as advertised (I'm sure it wouldn't) but on whether the idea of people adopting a conlang for ideological reasons makes any sense at all?
Looking at the real world:

• Esperanto never really took off. Neither did Lojban.
• On the other hand, Hebrew did.
• Gender-inclusive language in French has a lot more success than I'd have expected. I don't know about gender-neutral pronouns

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.

I read the book a long time ago, so can't go by in-world facts— but there may well not be enough of them to decide. So a better question may be, what would it take to make the adoption of Pravic plausible? Perhaps--

* the settlers come from a wide variety of lands, so there is no common or dominant language
* they aren't allowed to (or choose not to) settle in national ghettos, so they have to work out some interlanguage
* 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
* they really take their culture-independence seriously, so they're willing to teach all kids Pravic
* maybe they're ultra-conscious of the dominance of some Urrasian language, so highly motivated to counter it
* to provide motivation, all your health care forms are in Pravic
* they're used to interminable political meetings anyway, so they include a one-hour Pravic class in each one

Besides Hebrew, don't forget the development of pidgins and creoles.

The key bit is probably getting the children to all learn the language— and making sure they come from all sorts of linguistic backgrounds, so there's no real alternative.

(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?)

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...

Albania was teaching Esperanto for awhile but it died out quickly. Hard to find mention of it, even, except for a snippet of an article by Esperanto promoters that says

ALBANIA ACTS Esperanto or Three Languages to Learn The Albanian government has decreed that Esperanto be made an obligatory study in all high and commercial public schools ...

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.

I thought of mentioning Marain as well It's more or less the same trope as Pravic in play.
Dune is also worth mentioning. They use specific languages for secret communication - it's never really clear if they're conlangs or obscure languages (I think in universe they're conlangs). Again, I'm not sure how much sense it makes, but it's a neat bit of worldbuilding!

(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?)

Agreed -- but in the novel, Anarres has been settled for just a century, and the population's not high, so a single-planet language makes sense. (Urras, as an analog to Earth, has a realistic linguistic situation with multiple languages).

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Fri Dec 14, 2018 6:54 am Oh, and one other small point: the people who speak Pravic aren't humans.

I'm not sure that's relevant; it's been a while since I read the book -- but I think they were meant to act like humans...

And that's assuming that everyone's OK with just inserting computer chips into their brains, which is plausible but hardly certain.

Yeah, I have issues with that part myself Though zompist's point is equally valid with headphones, a fish, or translator microbes.

Zompist wrote:(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?)

At the risk of sounding confrontational or contrarian, are you sure about that? I have often heard translation characterized as an art with general guidelines and subjective factors playing a significant role. When translating something, you must take numerous subtle cultural and connotative factors into consideration. For that matter, I have even heard translating a text described as effectively writing the text anew in some other language, simply because the source and destination languages differ so radically. All that suggests that a fully mature translation machine would need some level of creativity along with merely parsing syntax and looking up words in dictionaries.

Icelandic has been successfully engineered to some extent (although there's probably as many instances of unsuccessful attempts).

The most prominent example was the elimination of "flámæli", the collapse of i/y /ɪ/ and e /ɛ/ to /e/, and u /ʏ/ and ö /œ/ to /ø/.

Other things include reverting to the original pronunciation of interrogatives in hve- from /kʰvʏ/ back to /kʰvɛ/. Also the elimination of the 1st person plural middle voice suffix inversion where a word such as sjáumst, sjá-um-st 'let's see each other' had become sjáustum, sjá-u-st-um. Old people say this still, but young people don't. Lastly, masculine strong nouns in -ir such as læknir 'doctor' had been reanalized with -ir as part of the root so they declined læknir, acc. læknir, dat. lækniri, gen. læknirs. This was again reversed by my parents' generation so my generation largley declines it the older way: læknir, lækni, lækni, læknis, i.e. with -r as a a nominative ending as opposed to part of the root.

The major failures include fighting "dative sickness" where accusative quirky-case subjects are replaced with dative ones, e.g. mig dreymir "I dream" becoming "mér dreymir". While many people are able to avoid this in writing or in certain fixed phrases, I'm pretty sure almost nobody has natively acquired perfect handling of accusative vs. dative subjects. I also think the subjunctive is a lost cause, we'll probably lose that in the next generation, and possible our traditional passive strategy for non-accusatives.

That is if Icelandic isn't dead by then anyway. Every time I go back now and I see children talking to each other privately, they just speak English. Icelandic seems to only be for talking to adults for a lot of Icelandic children. Sorry, totally off topic.

Ars Lande wrote: ↑Fri Dec 14, 2018 9:22 am

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Fri Dec 14, 2018 6:54 am Oh, and one other small point: the people who speak Pravic aren't humans.

I'm not sure that's relevant; it's been a while since I read the book -- but I think they were meant to act like humans...

More or less, sure - but it's certainly possible for non-Terrans in the Eikumen (or however she spells that) to be noticeable different in psychology - eg the entire plot of The Left Hand of Darkness. If someone thought Pravic were slightly unrealistic, they could just assume there was some small difference in psychology. Which wouldn't be implausible given the total weirdness of their views on physics...

And that's assuming that everyone's OK with just inserting computer chips into their brains, which is plausible but hardly certain.

Yeah, I have issues with that part myself Though zompist's point is equally valid with headphones, a fish, or translator microbes.

I don't think it's equally valid with headphones (the irritation of listening to two voices at once all the time), and my point is equally valid with fish or microbes - people won't necessarily want alien organisms fiddling with their brains...


vegfarandi: not totally off-topic! It's a good demonstration of how a population can have language shift toward a dominant language even when understanding isn't the primary issue. Icelandic children, like neuroimplanted children, can understand both Icelandic and English - yet you say they tend to talk in English even to one another. There's no reason neuroimplanted children wouldn't do likewise.

[and going back to the OP, the same process would explain why Pravic, originally a second language (as English is to Icelanders), could become the primary language of communication of moon-settlers, and from there could become the only language within a couple of generations.]

malloc wrote: ↑Fri Dec 14, 2018 10:26 am

Zompist wrote:(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?)

At the risk of sounding confrontational or contrarian, are you sure about that? I have often heard translation characterized as an art with general guidelines and subjective factors playing a significant role. When translating something, you must take numerous subtle cultural and connotative factors into consideration. For that matter, I have even heard translating a text described as effectively writing the text anew in some other language, simply because the source and destination languages differ so radically. All that suggests that a fully mature translation machine would need some level of creativity along with merely parsing syntax and looking up words in dictionaries.

Have you never looked at Google Translate? For instance, here's a paragraph from a novel:

Marcel Proust wrote:I was not with my aunt for five minutes, she sent me away for fear that I tired. She tended to my lips her sad pale forehead, on which, at that early hour, she had not yet arranged her false hair, and where the vertebrae appeared like the points of a crown of thorns or the grains of a rosary, and she said to me: "Come, my poor child, go, go prepare yourself for mass; and if you meet Francoise downstairs, tell her not to have too much fun with you, that she will soon come up to see if I need anything. "

Not bad as a translation; it's not fluent or entirely correct, but it's readable and avoids many of the pitfalls a beginning student would fall into. (E.g. the aunt's "Come" translates Allons, and is much better than the literal "Let's go"; and "come up" is monter, literally "go up, climb".)

Sure, literary translation is an art, and you should read Proust translated by a human. But Google's level of translation would be adequate for most human interactions— meeting people, travel, reading articles and the news, doing business. Of course you'd want it to handle spoken language, but that's why I added 50 years.

Also note, I said auxlangs— using your neurimplant to talk to a French speaker should be as effective as the two of you speaking Esperanto or some other third language.

malloc wrote: ↑Fri Dec 14, 2018 10:26 am

Zompist wrote:(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?)

At the risk of sounding confrontational or contrarian, are you sure about that? I have often heard translation characterized as an art with general guidelines and subjective factors playing a significant role. When translating something, you must take numerous subtle cultural and connotative factors into consideration. For that matter, I have even heard translating a text described as effectively writing the text anew in some other language, simply because the source and destination languages differ so radically. All that suggests that a fully mature translation machine would need some level of creativity along with merely parsing syntax and looking up words in dictionaries.

Have you never looked at Google Translate? For instance, here's a paragraph from a novel:

Marcel Proust wrote:I was not with my aunt for five minutes, she sent me away for fear that I tired. She tended to my lips her sad pale forehead, on which, at that early hour, she had not yet arranged her false hair, and where the vertebrae appeared like the points of a crown of thorns or the grains of a rosary, and she said to me: "Come, my poor child, go, go prepare yourself for mass; and if you meet Francoise downstairs, tell her not to have too much fun with you, that she will soon come up to see if I need anything. "

Not bad as a translation; it's not fluent or entirely correct, but it's readable and avoids many of the pitfalls a beginning student would fall into. (E.g. the aunt's "Come" translates Allons, and is much better than the literal "Let's go"; and "come up" is monter, literally "go up, climb".)

Sure, literary translation is an art, and you should read Proust translated by a human. But Google's level of translation would be adequate for most human interactions— meeting people, travel, reading articles and the news, doing business. Of course you'd want it to handle spoken language, but that's why I added 50 years.

Also note, I said auxlangs— using your neurimplant to talk to a French speaker should be as effective as the two of you speaking Esperanto or some other third language.

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Fri Dec 14, 2018 6:54 amAnd that's assuming that everyone's OK with just inserting computer chips into their brains, which is plausible but hardly certain.

As has been wisely said, predictions are hard, especially about the future. But this bit seems no more unlikely than people being OK with placing circles of glass in front of their eyes, or having a small slab of metal punched into their earlobe, or carrying a small slab of plastic and silicon in their pockets.

(Of course I'm assuming that the computer chip thing is stable. This is something people are trying out now! But the brain isn't that hospitable an environment for gadgets, and the procedure described in the article had to be undone because the bit that went through the skull was subject to infection. But it doesn't seem like a stretch to suppose that these problems will be solved.)

zompist wrote: ↑Fri Dec 14, 2018 4:23 pm

malloc wrote: ↑Fri Dec 14, 2018 10:26 am At the risk of sounding confrontational or contrarian, are you sure about that? I have often heard translation characterized as an art with general guidelines and subjective factors playing a significant role. When translating something, you must take numerous subtle cultural and connotative factors into consideration. For that matter, I have even heard translating a text described as effectively writing the text anew in some other language, simply because the source and destination languages differ so radically. All that suggests that a fully mature translation machine would need some level of creativity along with merely parsing syntax and looking up words in dictionaries.

Have you never looked at Google Translate? For instance, here's a paragraph from a novel:

Also note, I said auxlangs— using your neurimplant to talk to a French speaker should be as effective as the two of you speaking Esperanto or some other third language.

I think malloc is overstating the talent of human translators as well.
Translators get lazy too, or sometimes they just miss some idioms. I read a translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms that started something like 'Let's talk now about the way the word is ordered", which is technically correct, but loses -- I think -- but the meaning and the concise feel of the original.
I read Dune in French as a teenager, then in English as an adult: I was really surprised at how much of the grand sounding and the mysterious language that had impressed me was just an artifact of a poor translation.
(At one point Jessica describes dinner parties as 'a female thing' -- the translator went for 'une chose femelle', a literal translation which doesn't mean anything in French. Actually he improved upon the original: he turned a bit of gratuitous misogyny into esoteric Jungian jargon )
Not that I really blame the translator -- in those dark ages with no Internet, I wouldn't have done any better!

I'm not entirely sure there's a market for translator neurimplants for French-to-English, though. Even with little language skills, you can pick up enough broken English to get by in most circumstances.

As has been wisely said, predictions are hard, especially about the future. But this bit seems no more unlikely than people being OK with placing circles of glass in front of their eyes, or having a small slab of metal punched into their earlobe, or carrying a small slab of plastic and silicon in their pockets.

The thing is, you can remove the circles of glass whenever your eyes hurt; same with the metal in the earlobes. As for the slab of silicon, people increasingly feel that staring at it is just being rude.
But that's just nitpicking. No matter what form the interface takes, the fact remains that machine translation is likely to be reliable and accessible.

Ars Lande wrote: ↑Sat Dec 15, 2018 4:41 pmTranslators get lazy too, or sometimes they just miss some idioms. [...]

Sure. They can do great work, and yet the best thing is always to read the original. I admire but can't attain linguoboy's method, which is to learn all the languages. But at least I can avoid translators in the few languages I know well.

I'm not entirely sure there's a market for translator neurimplants for French-to-English, though. Even with little language skills, you can pick up enough broken English to get by in most circumstances.

Ideally your neurimplant should handle hundreds of languages. (Google Translate already handles 103.)

I think you underestimate how hard it is to get that broken English, though. Most Americans cannot get to that level in any other language. It's nice of the rest of the world to step up, I guess!

zompist wrote: ↑Fri Dec 14, 2018 4:23 pmHave you never looked at Google Translate? For instance, here's a paragraph from a novel:

Chances are of course that both the novel and its translation reside in Google Books, and the translation is mostly from an actual translation or translations :).


JAL

jal wrote: ↑Wed Dec 19, 2018 11:03 am

zompist wrote: ↑Fri Dec 14, 2018 4:23 pmHave you never looked at Google Translate? For instance, here's a paragraph from a novel:

Chances are of course that both the novel and its translation reside in Google Books, and the translation is mostly from an actual translation or translations .


JAL

I doubt that. That translation may be good for a robot, but it's surely too terrible to have been done professionally...