So I heard someone mention not too long ago that whole thingy about apparently needing government approval to go to another city as a North Korean, and how this is supposed to be this really terrible thing meant to Control the Population or whatever... and like, I didn't argue against what that person said because truth be told I don't know much about it and learning more about it is Kinda Difficult, but I just thought... aren't things in practice already pretty similar where I live?

Like, if I am employed, then I need to clock in every day, and notify and get the approval of my employer in order to be absent from my workplace. So if I randomly decide to spend the night in the next town over and miss or am late to work or perform worse at work because of it, then I could be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including getting fired and all that entails. And if I move to a new city, then the government expects me to notify them of my new address, because that could have implications for welfare and taxation and voting and census statistics and so forth. If I don't notify the government when I move to a new city, then that is Illegal and Bad and I'll get fined for it.

To me it then makes sense that if the state is my employer, that there would be a similar system in place, and that a centrally-planned economy would have a greater need for statistics as well (companies do well keep track of who's in which department, too, don't they!). And so to me it follows that inter-city travel would be expected to be documented and approved. Because "needing approval" does not equal "99% of applications are denied", right? That much should be obvious.

But all of this is really just me making assumptions about a country I've never actually been to and honestly know way too little about, based on what I feel makes more sense than "it's a literal 1984 hellscape where they eat babies".

If anybody actually knows anything about this topic or similar domestic travel restrictions in other AES states, then I'd love to hear about it.

This is a question I've been wondering for a while, but no matter how much I search, I just can't find any relevant results. I'm hoping that the people of this community can provide some resources about this topic, or if nothing else some interesting conjecture or discussion.

The sort of specific inspiration behind this question was thinking about how autistic people are a source of very innovative language use, and are often more likely to acquire and never unlearn "wrong" forms of words or grammar. A handful of linguistic traits that I've seen pathologized in autistic people where I live are more or less accepted in the speech of some other speech communities around the world. So, given some people's beliefs on the role of autistic people in prehistory, could a historical speech community looking to adopt distinctive speech patterns, turn to its neurodiverse population for inspiration?

But I'm also curious about disabilities or disorders aside from autism. How have things like deafness/hearing impairment, blindness/visual impairment, facial paralysis or motor issues, dyslexia, intellectual disability, limb loss, and so forth, affected spoken language, written language, and signed language, as used by language communities as a whole? With regard to sign language, I've heard that the high rate of blindness among the Deaf community of Honduras' Bay Islands resulted in the development of a tactile form of the local village sign. I'm sure that given the rate of disability prior to modern medicine, probably especially among venerated elders, that some amount of language development in the world must have been motivated by accessibility in the same way as BISL — or at the very least caused by inaccessibility, i.e. mishearings or mispronunciations due to disability getting passed on to abled acquaintances.

So yeah. Even though most of the world has for a pretty long time now been pretty ableist, and this is reflected in many languages' vocabularies, I'm still wondering if there are any linguistic clues that our abled ancestors did in fact try to take good care of their disabled brethren. This is what the archaeological record seems to show, so how about the linguistic record?