Issue with Issue #1194: Lost in Translation

[East Angria]

I have an issue with issue #1194: Lost in Translation.
I could not find any discussion nor information on this issue on the forum nor on third-party sites, so I felt it was necessary to start a new thread. Sorry if this is redundant, but I really searched far and wide without finding anything.

The issue is about a student of @@NAME@@'s language accidentally making death threats due to their imperfect knowledge of the language.
I picked option two, (iirc), which I understood as reducing the number of words that foreign language students have to learn in order to be considered fluent. Apparently, this option was meant as reducing the words of the langauge itself.

Okay, I get it, this is nation states, and some of the issue outcomes are whacky over-the-top nonsense, but how do you actually do this? How do you reduce words of a living language with several millions or even billions of speakers that use it every day? You can't just cross out words in the dictionary and suddenly people can't use them anymore. The best fictional example where something similar happened is Orwell's 1984, and there they had a totalitarian police state dictating every single move that their subjects made. It is possible to change the use of language and certain words through force in such a context. But you need a functioning police force, a totalitarian power structure, and years of supressive practice to actually purge the words from people's collective memory.

My nation has none of these things, and seeing how picking this option reduced my political freedoms by 10 percent, and my civil rights by 5 percent, I am left wondering how this sudden and complete change of its social climate could even have taken place.

I suggest making the language of the option in question unambiguous and making it unavailable to nations that lack police, prisons, courts, or combinations thereof - because there is no way to enforce the option without all of those.

[Candlewhisper Archive]

There's a longstanding tradition of NS Issue options doing things more extreme than common sense might suggest possible, and as long as they're within range of reasonable interpretation of what the option says, it's considered okay.

Specifically the phrasing here is:

This never would have happened in the first place if your language wasn’t so confusing! Why not simplify it and cut down on the amount of words so that it’s easier for everyone to learn?

This to me is pretty clear we're talking about simplifying the language, not just simplifying lessons.

It's also not unprecedented, as the issue DoublePlusUngood lets you do the same thing, though admittedly with stronger telegraphing that this is what is about to happen.

In terms of achieving realism, you should also know that we don't aim for realism at all. Rather, the goal is verisimilitude within the fictional setting. To be clear here, verisimilitude doesn't require that we emulate reality, just that we're consistent with the rules of our own setting. For example, Star Trek having FTL travel with no worries about relativity is unrealistic, but has verisimilitude. Star Trek having holodecks be used almost entirely for porn would be realistic, but would lack verisimilitude. The former is okay in Star Trek, the latter is not. The same sorts of thing apply for NS, where some things fit well with the reality of the game but are unrealistic, while some realistic things wouldn't work within the game's fiction.

The introduction of Newspeak might not be something that would realistically ever happen in the real world, but it's thematically consistent with dystopian satires like 1984, Brave New World or, say, Jennifer Government, though in the latter there'd probably be some corporate loyalty card incentive scheme for avoiding using anti-capitalist words.

I'm therefore not concerned that the implementation of such an option isn't "realistic". It fits the internal style and setting of Nationstates, so is reasonable for the presented story. I mean, let's not forget, this is a game where you can force everyone to eat nothing but pasta, require that all children are released into the wild to fend for themselves, and build a theme park around an oil slick. Legislating to reduce the size of the language is only moderately extreme, by NS standards.