Despite being a huge fan of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, I’d only read one of her works of science fiction, The Word for World is Forest. And despite being involved with the conlang community since the days of email lists, I’d never heard of Pravic, the language of the anarchists of The Dispossessed. Pravic is a constructed language, even within its setting, where it was created as part of the settlement of the moon Anarres by refugees from Urras.
Here are links to the pages that I found most useful to learn more about Pravic:
- The Utopian Pravic Language – Excellent overview of the language, part of a series about the book by The Peaceful Revolutionary.
- Names in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed – Zrajm analyzes the names used by Pravic speakers and proves that there aren’t enough names to uniquely identify all 20 million Pravic speakers, despite Le Guin’s claim that this happens. (Counterpoint: the consonants of the language may have distinctions to native speakers—labiodental, linguo-labial, dental, post-alveolar, retroflex, palatal, uvular—that aren’t marked in a text intended for English speakers.)
- How plausible is Pravic anyway? – A wide-ranging forum discussion on the Zompist Bulletin Board. (By coincidence, Zompist just published a review of another 1970s work of anarchism, Post-Scarcity Anarchism.)
- tvo-Pravic – This is an anarchist collaboration to create a full Pravic language, created by Martin Edwardes as part of a celebration of the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia. This language is not affiliated with Ursula K. Le Guin in any way.
As the first book within the chronology of the seven books of the Hainish Cycle, The Dispossessed is an excellent place to start with UKL’s science fiction, whether you are interested in the conlang Pravic or not. Its messages about the ills of capitalism still resonate today, over 50 years after publication.
