Conlang for a space colony

[Gareth3]

One of the justifications for space colonies in SF is to preserve the human race in case it's wiped out on Earth. So I've been thinking about what a colony would look like if it was actually designed purely for survival and stability. There's lot's of conworld detail I've come up with, like the constitutional monarchy and the peerage. But now I'm thinking about the language, which will be designed like the society from the ground up to prevent internal conflict. So here's some starting points:

*The language will be entirely unrelated to any natural language, and will be difficult for an English, Chinese, or Hindi speaker to learn, and vice versa.
This is to isolate the colony from the rest of humanity to prevent the spread of dangerous political or religious ideas.

*The language will be designed not to change or split into different languages.
Yes, strictly speaking this is impossible, language change is inevitable. But if you want to avoid the development of different languages which could lead to conflict, there's a few things you could do. Like designing a isolating language around a logographic script with no reference to pronunciation. Universal literacy keeps every word isolated, and even if the reading of each character changes, you can still communicate in writing. You could also design in language change - make the sound system unusual enough that sound change will happen in a predictable direction for everyone, and they can more-or-less understand each other.

*The language will discourage violence.
Getting into Sapir-Whorf territory here, but we may as well try. I'm not thinking of not having a word for "kill". It's more having a specific word for killing a person as opposed to an animal or plant, and having a gender system that strictly divides things up into people and non-people.

Any thoughts?

[finlay]

What would be most interesting is if you have such a language, but ultimately show that expecting the language to have any effect on people's political views directly is futile at best, and that the designers of the language were misguided.

You can't "design in" language change, though. What you could do is have such a small colony that they will always form one cohesive linguistic community, maybe up to 1000 people in total. And even then they are likely to split in some way.

[Gareth3]

Yeah, I haven't decided how well this plan would actually work. Although the designers are not actually totalitarians - the only thing they're interested in is the long-term survival of the colony. As long as the population doesn't wipe itself out through internal conflict, they don't care how its politics or culture evolves. Which lowers the bar a bit for the effect of the language.
As for sound change, you could also design the language to be as easy as possible for computers to understand, and include speech recognition in as many machines and appliances as possible. Even if the vernacular changes, everyone still has to speak the original language to set their alarm clock, and can use it as a lingua franca. Even if you reprogram all the computers, the new language will still be harder for them to understand.

[Torco]

I think you *can* design in specific lowest-resistance language change avenues for the future of a lang you make... like, if i make a conlang to be spoken by spanish speakers and put in a word that's like "sprem" i'm pretty sure they're going to end up pronouncing it "esprém" or something like that..

yeah, way more humble than what op had in mind, but still

[CaesarVincens]

To avoid phonological change, I'd keep the inventory fairly small and keep syllables to CV only. If the population is small with little to no contact with other languages, and literacy is high for a phonemic writing system, language change should be kept to a minimum.

For an inventory perhaps:
/i u a/
/p t k/
/m n/
/s/
/r/

[KathTheDragon]

You'd be surprised how high that 'minimum' really is.

[Torco]

just give them a huge library of movies in a specific dialect and ban dubbing on penalty of kick in the balls. their speech will drift away at the speed it will, but they'll forever be fluent in the One True Lect.

[Gareth3]

To avoid phonological change, I'd keep the inventory fairly small and keep syllables to CV only. If the population is small with little to no contact with other languages, and literacy is high for a phonemic writing system, language change should be kept to a minimum.

It's interesting that this is also the way to make a language easy for a computer to interpret - the fewer phonemes the better. Your sound system is similar to what I was thinking of, except that m and n might be too similar.

[Pogostick Man]

To avoid phonological change, I'd keep the inventory fairly small and keep syllables to CV only. If the population is small with little to no contact with other languages, and literacy is high for a phonemic writing system, language change should be kept to a minimum.

For an inventory perhaps:
/i u a/
/p t k/
/m n/
/s/
/r/

Change is still going to happen. Look at Lakes Plain in the Correspondence Library—it's reconstructed with ten (maybe eleven but the vanilla rhotic is largely unsupported) phonemes, five each of consonants and vowels, and yet it still managed to change a whole lot phonologically.

EDIT: Or, look at how allophony works in Pirahã and see how that could well develop into something new in the next few decades.

DOUBLE EDIT: Or that one dialect of Rotokas, already much deficient in phonemes, which had its nasals fall together with its voiced stops.

[Linguist Wannabe]

*The language will be entirely unrelated to any natural language, and will be difficult for an English, Chinese, or Hindi speaker to learn, and vice versa.

Wouldn't English, Chinese and Hindi native speakers learning the language bring in influence from their own languages? Grammatically and especially phonologically.

*The language will be designed not to change or split into different languages.
Yes, strictly speaking this is impossible, language change is inevitable. But if you want to avoid the development of different languages which could lead to conflict, there's a few things you could do. Like designing a isolating language around a logographic script with no reference to pronunciation. Universal literacy keeps every word isolated, and even if the reading of each character changes, you can still communicate in writing. You could also design in language change - make the sound system unusual enough that sound change will happen in a predictable direction for everyone, and they can more-or-less understand each other.

I`m not sure that it is possible to design a phonology that will only evolve in one direction in the long term. And for your goal, I don`t even think it would be necessary. Language divergence happens when speakers are cut off from each other. As long as you make sure that doesn`t happen, then it shouldn`t be an issue.

*The language will discourage violence.
Getting into Sapir-Whorf territory here, but we may as well try. I'm not thinking of not having a word for "kill". It's more having a specific word for killing a person as opposed to an animal or plant, and having a gender system that strictly divides things up into people and non-people.

Any thoughts?

If your language has a word for "die" and a causative, then it has a way to say "kill". Maybe a better way would be to have class of words that refer to forbidden actions.

[Gareth3]

The idea is that in the colony, children are raised from birth by parents who have been carefully trained to speak only the standard language. The language will change, but not through outside influence. Making it unusual and difficult for Earth people to speak just makes it harder to communicate if contact is somehow re-established. You could even conceal the existence of other languages from the colony - teach them that speech that they don't understand is just a symptom of mental illness.

[finlay]

Again, this is an interesting idea as long as when you write your story you show that this is all a wrong-headed and false way of thinking. Maybe your character discovers that the mental illness thing is a lie. Or maybe the people who set up the colony (who sound like dictatorial megalomaniacs, frankly) enforce all these rules, but find that it makes no difference at all to the people. If you insert this idea as a background detail and don't explore it any further, and just expect us to take it at its word that this kind of thing would happen, then I'm having trouble believing it.