The Ascian Language is a fictional language

Fictional language

Fictional languages are by far the largest group of artistic languages. Fictional languages are intended to be the languages of a fictional world and are often designed with the intent of giving more depth and an appearance of plausibility to the fictional worlds with which they are associated, and...

 invented by Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He is noted for his dense, allusive prose as well as the strong influence of his Catholic faith, to which he converted after marrying into the religion. He is a prolific short story writer and a novelist, and has won many awards in the...

 for his fantasy series The Book of the New Sun

The Book of the New Sun

The Book of the New Sun is a novel in four parts written by science fiction and fantasy author Gene Wolfe. It chronicles the journey and ascent to power of Severian, a disgraced journeyman torturer who rises to the position of Autarch, the one ruler of the free world...

.

The language is spoken by the inhabitants of the “northern continents” of the future earth, the Ascians, who are enslaved by their masters (the Group of Seventeen) in a way much like the people of Oceania in George Orwell

George Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair , better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist...

's book 1984

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel about Oceania, a society ruled by the oligarchical dictatorship of the Party...

.

The language

The Ascian language consists of two levels: On the low level it is just an ordinary language, of whose syntax, grammar and vocabulary virtually nothing is known. What makes the language unique is the second level.

Although Ascian is their mother tongue, adult Ascians don't understand plain Ascian sentences, unless they are direct quotations from governmental propaganda materials (called Correct Thought). So, in order to communicate, an Ascian has to know by heart thousands of these quotations (sentences) on many different topics.

As the northern continents are at war with the southern Commonwealth (where most protagonists of the books live), there are interpreters in the Ascian army to interrogate prisoners. These speak the language of the Commonwealth, but as they are unable to think outside the approved texts, what they say is just literal translations of the Ascian approved sentences.

A very similar concept of a language is presented in the Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek: The Next Generation is an American science fiction television series created by Gene Roddenberry as part of the Star Trek franchise. Roddenberry, Rick Berman, and Michael Piller served as executive producers at different times throughout the production...

episode "Darmok" from 1991.

Psychology

The reason for the Group of Seventeen to impose on their people this complicated concept of a language is much like Orwell’s concept of Newspeak

Newspeak

Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it refers to the deliberately impoverished language promoted by the state. Orwell included an essay about it in the form of an appendix in which the basic principles of the language are explained...

. In order to prevent the Ascians from ever developing critical thought (and subsequently inciting revolts), the language is limited as to make it impossible to express it. This corresponds to the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...

.

Nevertheless, Gene Wolfe suggests that this concept doesn't work out like that. It is shown that intelligent Ascians are very well able to express, by means of approved sentences only, meanings that exceed those of the quoted sources. They simply quote such sentences as suggest connotations by the used epithets regardless of the actual meaning of the approved text. See the examples for further clarification.

Examples

In "The Citadel of the Autarch", the fourth volume of The Book of the New Sun series, there is a story told by an Ascian prisoner (who identifies himself only as "Loyal to the Group of Seventeen"), which is translated by people of the Commonwealth into our way of speaking. Some examples from this story:

• “In times past, loyalty to the cause of the populace was to be found everywhere. The will of the Group of Seventeen was the will of everyone.”
  “Once upon a time…”
• “The people meeting in counsel may judge, but no one is to receive more than a hundred blows.”
  “He complained, and they beat him.”
• “How are the hands nourished? By the blood. How does the blood reach the hands? By the veins. If the veins are closed, the hands will rot away.”
  “He left that farm and took to the roads.”
• “Where the Group of Seventeen sit, there final justice is done.”
  “He went to the capital and complained of the way he had been treated.”

The word "Ascian"

Although unfamiliar to most readers, this is not a word invented by Wolfe,
nor is it a form of "Asians". It means 'Tropic

Tropics

The tropics is a region of the Earth surrounding the Equator. It is limited in latitude by the Tropic of Cancer in the northern hemisphere at approximately  N and the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern hemisphere at  S; these latitudes correspond to the axial tilt of the Earth...

-dweller', and it came into English by way of medieval Latin

Medieval Latin

Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. Despite the clerical origin of many of its authors,...

 as an adaptation of ancient Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

ἄσκιος, literally 'without a shadow'.
In the Tropics, the sun is exactly overhead at noon twice a year, and at that time a person standing straight up will cast no shadow.