Nuffie

Thursday 30 May 2013

The Principles of Newspeak; The B Vocabulary.

Assalamualaikum WBT,

I am so sorry for not writing for quite sometimes, well, for those who read my blog, thank you very much. I love you so much, thank you. I have no words to express my great feeling.

Well, in the last entry, I wrote about The Principles of Newspeak. I did write about the first part of the principles, it actually have two more. The second one would be The B vocabulary. It is consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes : words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. 

To be honest, without a full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult to use these word correctly. Well, I have problems to understand them too, hahha.. no kidding. To use something that really alien to use is actually hard eyh? The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language. The B words were in all cases compound words.

They consisted of two or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb, inflected according to the ordinary rules. Take this one example, the word goodthink, meaning very roughly, 'orthodoxy', or, if one chose to regard it as a verb, 'to think in an orthodox manner'. This inflected as follows; noun-verb, goodthink; past tense and past participle, goodthinked; present participle, goodthinking; adjective, goodthinkful; adverb, goodthinkwiser; verbal noun, goodthinker. These are just fron one example. Irregular formations of words in the B words are common. No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms.

This is one important fact o Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. For those who master Newspeak, they would be a really great note-taker, journalist. Why? Because they could easily understand things in Oldspeak and easily rephrase in Newspeak, right? 

If you can see, we have only few words to choose from this is because, Newspeak's vocabulary was tiny and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak's lexical are actually increasing year by year and there is one famous word in Newspeak which is duckspeak. Meaning, people talked without even using their own brains. In other words, 'to quack like a duck". Well, you know duck? They quacking and making weird, loud sounds, but then, there is nothing. 

Well, I think that is enough for now. To be honest, this topic is not an easy topic. Plus, I surely do not use Newspeak in my everyday life. Well, I might but my language was called sarcasm. hahha, I used that a lot. 

Assalamualaikum WBT

ref : 'The Principles of Newspeak' written by George Orwell 1948.

p/s: To be honest, I need to read more about this. Yes!

2 comments:

  1. Not quite agree about duck that you had mentioned there.

    Here I paste for you.

    Vocalization: Contrary to popular belief, very few ducks have "quack" calls, and their range of vocalizations includes whistles and growls. Whereas in most types of birds the males are more vocal, with ducks it is the female who makes the most noise, though males are equally vocal during the breeding season.

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  2. t.a.t.a. : special big thanks for commenting on my blog. Appreciate it a lot. Yup, I do agree with that opinion, I do know that quacking does not mean nothing eyh? It means something, but, in the rules of Newspeak, they considered duckspeak as nonsense, in term of talking. In Malay we called it Tin Kosong. You must know about tin kosong thingy right? hehehe..

    thank you.

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