Pravic

SPOKEN BY

Pravic is spoken by the inhabitants of the anarchist society on Anarres.

DOCUMENTED BY

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929– ) uses Pravic in The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974), the fifth book in the Hainish Cycle: Rocannon’s World (1964), Planet of Exile (1966), City of Illusions (1967), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974), The Word for World is Forest (1976), and The Telling (2000).

BEHIND THE WORDS

The Dispossessed (1974) takes place on Urras, where revolutionaries were offered the chance to live on Anarres, the planet’s moon. Events on Urras are driven by the two superpowers, A-Io and Thu. Pravic is spoken on Anarres.

DERIVATION OF THE LANGUAGE

Farigv created the language Pravic for use on Anarres, fashioning the language to represent the anarchist beliefs of the society.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LANGUAGE

Since there is no private property on Anarres, possessive pronouns do not exist.

Shevek talking about Pravic with the ship’s doctor:

“The vocabulary makes it difficult,” Shevek said, pursuing his discovery. “In Pravic the word religion is seldom. No, what do you say—rare. Not often used. Of course, it is one of the Categories: the Fourth Mode. Few people learn to practice all the Modes. But the Modes are built of the natural capacities of the mind, you could not seriously believe that we had no religious capacity? That we could do physics while we were cut off from the profoundest relationship man has with the cosmos?”

A TASTE OF THE LANGUAGE

Since Pravic is translated into English in consideration of the readers, the primary examples of the language are names:

Farigv

Gvarab

Kadagv

Kvetur

Kvigot

PHILOLOGICAL FACT

Le Guin was the daughter of an anthropologist, so it’s perhaps not surprising that her novels deal with themes of interest to anthropology. She raises questions in her books about race, sexual identity, environmentalism, and political conflict.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Review the works listed above, the resources listed in the bibliography, and the website: Ursula K. Le Guin (www.ursulakleguin.com/).

UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR

In the Australian-American television series Farscape (1999–2003), John Crichton is injected with a bacteria that colonizes his brainstem and automatically translates most languages he hears.

SPEAKING OF LANGUAGES

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

—T. S. Eliot