Newspeak
From NewspeakWiki
Newspeak is a fictional language in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it is described as being "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year." Orwell included an essay about it in the form of an Appendix (in the past tense), in which the basic principles of the language are explained. Newspeak is closely based on English but has a greatly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar. This suited the totalitarian regime of the Party, whose aim was to make any alternative thinking ("thoughtcrime") or speech impossible by removing any words or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom, rebellion and so on.
Here is the official definition from the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
- new•speak ('nü-"spEk, 'nyü-), noun, Usage: often capitalized. : propagandistic language marked by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings. Etymology: Newspeak, a language "designed to diminish the range of thought," in the novel 1984 (1949) by George Orwell. Date: 1950
Newspeak is "politically correctness" taken to the point of absurdity. Newspeak is based on standard English, but all words describing "unorthodox" political ideas have been removed. In addition, there was an attempt to remove the overall number of words in general, to limit the range of ideas that could be expressed.
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[edit] Basic principles of Newspeak
[edit] Destruction of synonyms & antonyms
The basic idea behind Newspeak was to remove all shades of meaning from language, leaving simple dichotomies (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, good thoughts and thoughtcrimes) which reinforce the total dominance of the State. Similarly, Newspeak root words served as both nouns and verbs, which allowed further reduction in the total number of words; for example, "think" served as both noun and verb, so the word "thought" was unneeded and could be abolished. A staccato rhythm of short syllables was also a goal, further reducing the need for deep thinking about language. (See duckspeak.) Successful Newspeak meant that there would be fewer and fewer words -- dictionaries would get thinner and thinner.
In addition, words with opposite meanings were removed as redundant, so "bad" became "ungood." Words with comparative and superlative meanings were also simplified, so "better" became "gooder", and "best" likewise became "goodest". Intensifiers could be added, so "great" became "plusgood", and "excellent" or "splendid" likewise became "doubleplusgood." Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix "-ful" to a root word (e.g. "goodthinkful", orthodox in thought), and adverbs by adding "-wise" ("goodthinkwise", in an orthodox manner). In this manner, as many words as possible were removed from the language. The ultimate aim of Newspeak was to reduce even the dichotomies to a single word that was a "yes" of some sort: an obedient word with which everyone answered affirmatively to what was asked of them.
Some of the constructions in Newspeak which Orwell derides, such as replacing "bad" with "ungood", are in fact characteristic of agglutinative languages, although foreign to English. It is also possible that Orwell modeled aspects of Newspeak on Esperanto; for example "ungood" is constructed similarly to the Esperanto word "malbona". Orwell had been exposed to Esperanto in 1927 when living in Paris with his aunt Kate Limouzin and her husband Eugène Lanti, a prominent Esperantist. Esperanto was the language of the house, and Orwell was disadvantaged by not speaking it, which may account for some antipathy towards the language It can also be observed that some strongly hierarchical groups use these kinds of constructions liberally. For example, the Swedish Military jargon substitutes "unpeace" (Swedish: ofred) for "war", and "ungood" (Swedish: obra) for "bad".
The real life pitfall of the Newspeak is, of course, that there are real-life agglutinative languages which act exactly as Orwell suggests, and the various suffixes, prefixes and derivatives allow almost endless possibilities for neologizising. Certain languages, such as Finnish, Japanese or Hungarian, work almost perfectly on the Newspeak principles — they have very sparse basic vocabularies, but almost all the expressions are derived from the stem words by various prefixes and suffixes.
[edit] Controlling Thought
Examples of Newspeak, from the novel, include: "crimethink"; "doubleplusungood"; and "Ingsoc." They mean, respectively: "thought-crime"; "extremely bad"; and "English Socialism," the official political philosophy of the Party. The word "Newspeak" itself also comes from the language. Note that all of these words would be obsolete and should be removed in the "final" version of Newspeak, except for "doubleplusungood" in certain contexts, such as as illustrated in the preceding paragraph.
Generically, Newspeak has come to mean any attempt to restrict disapproved language by a government or other powerful entity.
The most important aim of newspeak was to provide a means of speaking that required no thought what-so-ever. It uses abbreviations or clipped conjunctions in order to mask or alter a word's true meaning. For example, words such as Miniluv and joycamp, allow the speaker to speak without actually being force to think about what they were talking about.. or at least, not as much as if they were required to use complete phrases such as "Ministry of Love" or "Forced Labor Camp". These words just roll right off the lips before the speaker can even contemplate what he is really saying.
Reducing the number of words also removes any literary value to writing, because there would only be one distinct way to present any particular concept. It would be impossible to write a book like Common Sense , Uncle Tom's Cabin, or even 1984 in Newspeak. Not only would the correct words for certain concepts not be available, but a lack of adjectives would cause the writing would be completely bland and unemotional, which in itself would keep people from reading at all.
