"the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which OLDTHINK was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These words, necessarily few in number, had had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a single comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten"
The Principles of Newspeak (1949)
121–130 of 145 posts
Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...you must also accept... But another good thing about fiction is how few "musts" there are in its interpretation.
Agreed, given that this is fiction, everything is possible, however... ... since this is an in-universe account of Newspeak (because of the way the essay refers to Newspeak, we know it's not just Orwell the author speaking), and since this account wouldn't be possible in Newspeak itself, and furthermore, and because this is written in past tense, we have a pretty good indication that Newspeak failed. And because News…
I remain unconvinced.
Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately there is no way to know whether the future from which newspeak is in the past, is not even more horrifically dystopian. Imagine arriving on a seemingly dead planet and discovering this article about newspeak on a primitive but still working library computer in a museum. Elsewhere in the museum a slowly decaying advanced compute core still executes the corrupted remains of the last of the human conscious…
Death is too optimistic about dystopias. 1984 wasn't a world which wanted to kill you: it might, but that wasn't the goal. The goal was to keep the system going: achieve absolute dominion over the human condition and thought. Suicide means that's no longer happening, so it can't have that. The 1984 cycle continues forever: it is it's own purpose.
I wonder how 1984 world would deal with resource depletion.
Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Get proficiency over the language You'd ideally say proficient with the language, not over .
Thank you! I used "over" to suggest dominance. Surely you "do something better with something", but I wanted to express "the acquired capacity of "advanced doing" covering the subject" ("get advanced-doingness over").
The common English phrase for language dominance would be "command of" the language.
You could also say "mastery over" the language.
Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Death is too optimistic about dystopias. 1984 wasn't a world which wanted to kill you: it might, but that wasn't the goal. The goal was to keep the system going: achieve absolute dominion over the human condition and thought. Suicide means that's no longer happening, so it can't have that. The 1984 cycle continues forever: it is it's own purpose.
I wonder how 1984 world would deal with resource depletion.
Probably pretty well: the suffering and dominance is the point. War machines destroy excess production, then people would be tasked with harvesting the war machines.
The system doesn't care if anyone is happy or fulfills their dreams - it's goal is explicitly the opposite. As long as the sun burns, it continues.
Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)
#126Esperanto probably inspired Orwell on this, at least to an extent. He knew several Esperantists. Most of the "A vocabulary" rules are similar, like valuing regularities. I wonder if he hated esperanto, or just conveniently borrowed the feel of an artificial language from it. To me, the euphemisation aspects of newspeak are the most "orwellian." IE, they're most likely to trigger that reference. Orwell himself complai…
Esperanto probably inspired Orwell on this Nope. Simple English did. During WWII, Orwell had a job with the British Ministry of Information. Part of his job was translating news broadcasts into Basic English, an 850-word vocabulary, for broadcast to the British colonies. (India, Hong Kong, etc.) He discovered that translating speeches into Basic English was a political act. All the ambiguity had to be hammered out. B…
Very informative. Bookmarked.
Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technical name is a bit funny, in the past we had no issues calling something a "spanish flu", "bird flu" or "Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease", now these are officially considered "inappropriate". With the WHO responsible for picking an interim name until an appropriate name could be issued when an inappropriate name enters common use. They even list tourism among the things that absolutely need protection against this typ…
> Spanish Flu Which the Spanish called “French Flu”, and which many signs point to it actually being “American Flu”: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/
> American Flu
Funny how Wikipedia mentions that it was used early on in France but in order to avoid antagonizing an ally journalists were advised (source is a bit short on that) to call it the Spanish flu[1]. So there was also active suppression going on to keep the source out of the news, just back then it was at least partially war time censorship.
Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)
#128A lot of the "principles" behind Newspeak are bollocks, from a linguistic point of view. For example there's nothing intrinsically less expressive in an agglutinative typology (e.g. "doubleplusungood" instead of "really, really bad"); and everything said about removal of meanings fail, once you remember that humans weave new meanings around on old words, in the same fashion as spiders weave new webs on old trees.
I don't blame Orwell for that though. He was not talking about Linguistics; he was trying to highlight a political issue - words being politically engineered, to gather support for outrageous ideas, that would be not supported otherwise; that was as much of an issue in his times as it is now. And Newspeak works really well to illustrate that.
Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)
#129One thing I noticed as an English person during my time in the US is that you have less words . E.g. everything really is awesome! This is pretty much exactly double plus good. In English English we have a dazzling array (sorry, awesome list) of adjectives, often particularly tied to certain nouns. For example 'a splendid view [out the window]', we wouldn't say a person is 'splendid' - except the somewhat archaic 'sp…
You must have encountered a very limited cross-section of Americans in a limited array of circumstances.
Re: The Principles of Newspeak (1949)
#130this comment section is one of the worst cesspits of oldbrain i have seen on this hell site.
I genuinely have no idea what you're trying to say.