Free Child of Earth by David Gerrold

the Pitcairn Project, and if it worked, that would probably be the way we’d cross over. We’d build a little town of our own, put up some outpost markers, and wait to be discovered.
    Meanwhile, we were going to start out with three months of training in Callo City. We’d spend two hours in the morning learning the language and two more hours in the afternoon. The rest of the day would be spent learning skills like chopping wood, building fires, skinning wabbits, sewing clothes, making soap, canning fruit, milling flour and all the various rituals and prayers as well. And after we’d mastered as much of that as we could, then we’d get to build a farm.

IN TRAINING
    AFTER A WEEK, they moved us to a cluster of sandbag cabins on one of the hills near the city. We had one big house where we did all the cooking and family meetings, and three little houses where everybody slept. All the kids and two of the moms were in one house, and the adults split themselves up in the others.
    We forgot pretty fast that we were living in a dome. If you looked real hard, maybe you could see some lines in the sky where the cables attached, or maybe when you were up high enough, you could see that the mountains looked too close. But mosty, we felt like we were really on Linnea.
    We weren’t allowed to wear any clothes that we hadn’t made ourselves. The clothes we had been given weren’t new; they were hand-medowns. Gamma sniffed and said they made us look like refugees. She and the moms started sewing almost immediately.
    I didn’t like Linnean clothes. They were itchy and scratchy, especially the underwear, but we had to live totally Linnean—we had to dress like Linneans, eat like Linneans, we had to speak like Linneans, and most important of all, we had to think like Linneans. So, it didn’t matter if the underwear was itchy. We just had to get used to it.
    We weren’t even allowed to complain in English. If somebody used an English word, everybody would pretend they didn’t understand for a while before telling us the Linnean word. But there were some words that didn’t translate at all, so there were some things you just couldn’t say.

    We had classes two days on and one day off, children and adults all together in one room; the third day, we always had church. The trainers said that we would have to forget our seven-day week, that’s not how time was marked on Linnea, but most of us kids felt it wasn’t fair that we didn’t get any days off at all.
    At first, learning the Linnean language seemed impossible—then it got harder. For instance, the Linneans didn’t have the verb to be in their language. Words like am, are, is, was, were and even become just didn’t exist. You couldn’t say, “I am hungry,” or, “My name is Kaer.” You had to say, “I feel hunger,” or, “You may call me Kaer.” At first, it was hard to say anything at all, because we all had to stop and think about how to say even the simplest things.
    Our teacher told us one day—in English—that this actually represented an interesting philosophical problem. If you can’t say something, you can’t think it, because words are the bricks out of which we build thoughts. If the language didn’t have the appropriate conceptual foundation, then whole domains of thought were impossible. You can’t go somewhere that isn’t on the map. So, it wasn’t just a matter of learning how to speak like Linneans, we had to learn how to think like them—to live in their conceptual map, not ours. Some days, we’d suddenly get an Aha! —and we’d understand another piece of what we were struggling with, but most days it just felt like a lot of struggle without anything going klunk.
    What made it even harder was that the language wasn’t spoken as much as it was sung. Kind of like French, only worse. Everything had to have a