The Ascian language

In The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe imagined a language called Ascian. Its speakers have very little grammatical leeway when producing speech. In fact, they may only choose from among a limited list of possible utterances which have been "approved" by a ruling, crushingly totalitarian camarilla. Those are the only valid utterances in the language. Some examples:

The people meeting in counsel may judge, but no one is to receive more than a hundred blows.

One is strong, another beautiful, a third a cunning artificer. Which is best? He who serves the populace.

The citizen renders to the populace what is due to the populace. What is due to the populace? Everything.

It's like Orwell's Newspeak carried to the ultimate limit. Not only particular words and concepts are prohibited, but linguistic creativity itself. Still, the novel recounts how an ascian captured in battle is able (with the help of an interpreter) to tell a story that criticizes the ruling camarilla. Gene Wolfe seems to be rebuking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: even in the most restricted of languages, you can find workarounds to communicate (or at least insinuate) any idea you want. On the other hand, the story may have been more the product of the interpreter than of the ascian himself...

I was reminded of the Ascian language when I read the Wikipedia page for Lexis. Apparently, we too employ formulaic language most of the time:

The major finding of this research is that language users rely to a very high extent on ready-made language “lexical chunks”, which can be easily combined to form sentences. This eliminates the need for the speaker to analyze each sentence grammatically, yet deals with a situation effectively. Typical examples include “I see what you mean” or “Could you please hand me the …” or “Recent research shows that…”

Language usage, on the other hand, is what takes place when the ready-made chunks do not fulfill the speaker’s immediate needs; in other words, a new sentence is about to be formed and must be analyzed for correctness. Grammar rules have been internalized by native speakers, allowing them to determine the viability of new sentences. Language usage might be defined as a fall-back position when all other options have been exhausted.