Newspeak…
‘’an imaginary form of language in George Orwell’s 1984, in which the size of vocabulary and ranges of meaning were so restricted that this in itself restricted the concepts and thoughts that a person was capable of formulating’’
George Orwell wrote his novel ‘1984’ on the Island of Jura in Scotland, during the 1947-48 periods. The final manuscript of the novel was sent to ‘Secker and Warburg’ editorial house. They published ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ on the 8th of May 1949. The novel success demanded that it was published in 65 more languages, the greatest number for any novel published. The Newspeak language used ‘1984’ are ‘contemporary bywords for personal privacy lost to the state’. Newspeak is known to say the opposite of what it means.
Here are some examples:
‘Ministry of Peace’ deals with War, ‘Ministry of Love’ deals with Law and Order.
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and was created to meet the needs of English Socialism. In 1984 no one used Newspeak, as their only means of communication. In the Times Newspaper, some of the principal articles were written in Newspeak. But this was hard and could only be done by a specialist. Newspeak was expected to take over from Standard English or ‘Oldspeak’ by the year 2050. Since the appearance of Newspeak it has been used more widely in Politics especially. Politicians will use Newspeak in their everyday speech.
Its expressions were constructed to give exact and very often slight expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while not including all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at those meanings via indirect methods. This was done partially by the formation of new words, but mainly, eliminating unwanted words and by ‘stripping such words that remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings’. An example of this is the word ‘free’. It still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of requirement, nameless. Apart from the control of definitely ‘heretical’ words, the lessening of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to continue to exist. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to fade the range of thought, and this purpose was circuitously assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly-created words, would be barely comprehensible to an English-speaker of our own day.
Friday, 23 April 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why no updates this term?
ReplyDelete