The Principles of Newspeak.

Assalamualaikum WBT,

Well, well, well... I am back again with more new information. After Malaysia's 13th General Election, dramas, dramas and dramas. Hahaha.. Well, whatever it is, the results were out and Barisan Nasional is back AGAIN to rule Malaysia. *sigh? hahaha.. I do not know. I wish for better Malaysia, I love Malaysia, but then.. Well, enough! 

Now, I am going to write about Newspeak. Do you know what is Newspeak? Well, Newspeak was official language of Oceania, and it had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc. What is Ingsoc? Ingsoc is English Socialism. Ingsoc is also a Newspeak, Eng-lish and Soc-alism so, Ingsoc. In the year, 1984, there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles of the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only carried out by specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or standard English language, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. 

Meanwhile, Newspeak gained ground steadily, all party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The purpose of Newspeak was not only provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought it dependent on words. 

Its vocabulary was constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

Let us see an example, the word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politicaly free" or "intellectually free", since political in intellectual freedom are no longer existed even as concepts, and therefore it is necessity nameless. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly 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 intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary, the B vocabulary, and the C vocabulary. It would be simpler to discuss each class separately, but the grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories. 

A vocabulary : words are simple, concept word.

There are two outstanding peculiarities, 1. almost complete interchangeability between different parts of speech. 2. Regularity.

Number 1 is for example, speedful meant "rapid" and the noun verb, and adverbs by adding -wise as in speedwise meant "quickly". Goodful, goodwise and so on. Other examples, could be negative by adding the affix- un-, or could be strengthened by the affix plus-, or, for still greater emphasis doubleplus-. Thus, for example, uncold meant "warm" while pluscold and doublepluscold meant, respectively, "very cold" and "superlatively cold." Given the word good, there was no need for such a word as bad, since the required meaning was equally well --indeed better-- expressed by ungood. All that was necessary, in any case where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of them to suppress. Dark, for example, could be replaced by Unlight, or light by undark, according to preference.

I will continue with B vocabulary and C vocabulary, plus duckspeak and more.

Read this first and be good okay, do not be ungood.

Assalamualaikum WBT

Ref : 'The Principle of Newspeak' written by George Orwell 1948. 

p/s: Need to read more.