Posted on 09/07/2001 4:07:14 AM PDT by vannrox
* APPENDIX. The Principles of Newspeak*
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been
devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English
Socialism. 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 in The Times
were written in it, but this was a tour de force which
could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that
Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard
English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.
Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending
to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and
more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and
embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak
Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many
superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be
suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as
embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are
concerned here.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to 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 is
dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so 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 meanings 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 by stripping such words as remained of
unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary
meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word
free 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 necessity nameless. Quite apart
from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction
of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word
that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. 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 (also called compound words), and the C vocabulary.
It will 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.
The A vocabulary.
The A vocabulary consisted of the
words needed for the business of everyday life -- for such
things as eating, drinking, working, putting on one's clothes,
going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening,
cooking, and the like. It was composed almost entirely of words
that we already possess words like hit, run, dog, tree,
sugar, house, field -- but in comparison with the
present-day English vocabulary their number was extremely
small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined. All
ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them.
So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class
was simply a staccato sound expressing one clearly
understood concept. It would have been quite impossible to use
the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or
philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express
simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects
or physical actions.
The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities.
The first of these was an almost complete interchangeability
between different parts of speech. Any word in the language (in
principle this applied even to very abstract words such as
if or when) could be used either as verb, noun,
adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and the noun form, when
they were of the same root, there was never any variation, this
rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms.
The word thought, for example, did not exist in
Newspeak. Its place was taken by think, which did duty
for both noun and verb. No etymological principle was followed
here: in some cases it was the original noun that was chosen
for retention, in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and
verb of kindred meaning were not etymologically connected, one
or other of them was frequently suppressed. There was, for
example, no such word as cut, its meaning being
sufficiently covered by the noun-verb knife. Adjectives
were formed by adding the suffix-ful to the noun-verb,
and adverbs by adding -wise. Thus for example,
speedful meant 'rapid' and speedwise meant
'quickly'. Certain of our present-day adjectives, such as
good, strong, big, black, soft, were retained,
but their total number was very small. There was little need
for them, since almost any adjectival meaning could be arrived
at by adding-ful to a noun-verb. None of the
now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a very few
already ending in-wise: the -wise termination was
invariable. The word well, for example, was replaced by
goodwise.
In addition, any word -- this again applied in principle
to every word in the language -- could be negatived 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'. It was also
possible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of
almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ante-,
post-, up-, down-, etc. By such methods it
was found possible to bring about an enormous diminution of
vocabulary. Given, for instance, 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.
The second distinguishing mark of Newspeak grammar was its
regularity. Subject to a few exceptions which are mentioned
below all inflexions followed the same rules. Thus, in all
verbs the preterite and the past participle were the same and
ended in-ed. The preterite of steal was
stealed, the preterite of think was
thinked, and so on throughout the language, all such
forms as swam, gave, brought, spoke,
taken, etc., being abolished. All plurals were made by
adding-s or-es as the case might be. The plurals of man, ox,
life, were mans, oxes, lifes. Comparison of
adjectives was invariably made by adding-er,-est (good,
gooder, goodest), irregular forms and the more, most
formation being suppressed.
The only classes of words that were still allowed to
inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the
demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. All of these
followed their ancient usage, except that whom had been
scrapped as unnecessary, and the shall, should tenses
had been dropped, all their uses being covered by will
and would. There were also certain irregularities in
word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy
speech. A word which was difficult to utter, or was liable to
be incorrectly heard, was held to be ipso facto a bad
word: occasionally therefore, for the sake of euphony, extra
letters were inserted into a word or an archaic formation was
retained. But this need made itself felt chiefly in connexion
with the B vocabulary. Why so great an importance was
attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear later in
this essay.
The B vocabulary.
The B vocabulary 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. Without a
full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult
to use these words correctly. In some cases they couId be
translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A
vocabulary, but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and
always involved the loss of certain overtones. 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, and inflected according to the ordinary rules. To
take a single 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, good-
thinking; adjective, goodthinkful; adverb,
goodthinkwise; verbal noun, goodthinker.
The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan.
The words of which they were made up could be any parts of
speech, and could be placed in any order and mutilated in any
way which made them easy to pronounce while indicating their
derivation. In the word crimethink (thoughtcrime), for
instance, the think came second, whereas in
thinkpol Thought Police) it came first, and in the
latter word police had lost its second syllable. Because
of the great difficuIty in securing euphony, irregular
formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than in the A
vocabulary. For example, the adjective forms of Minitrue,
Minipax, and Miniluv were, respectively,
Minitruthful, Minipeaceful, and Minilovely,
simply because- trueful,-paxful, and-loveful were
slightly awkward to pronounce. In principle, however, all B
words could inflect, and all inflected in exactly the same way.
Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barely
intelligible to anyone who had not mastered the language as a
whole. Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a
Times leading article as Oldthinkers unbellyfeel
Ingsoc. The shortest rendering that one could make of this
in Oldspeak would be: 'Those whose ideas were formed before the
Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of the
principles of English Socialism.' But this is not an adequate
translation. To begin with, in order to
Compound words such as speakwrite,
were of course to be found in the A vocabulary, but these were
merely convenient abbreviations and had no special ideologcal
colour.
grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted
above, one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by
Ingsoc. And in addition, only a person thoroughly
grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate the full force of the word
bellyfeel, which implied a blind, enthusiastic
acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word
oldthink, which was inextricably mixed up with the idea
of wickedness and decadence. But 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
greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak
Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented
them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to
say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.
As we have already seen in the case of the word free,
words which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes
retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the
undesirable meanings purged out of them. Countless other words
such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism,
democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased
to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering
them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round the
concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained
in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping
themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism
were contained in the single word oldthink. Greater
precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a
Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient
Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations
other than his own worshipped 'false gods'. He did not need to
know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch,
Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the less he knew about them
the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the
commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with
other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat
the same way, the party member knew what constituted right
conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew
what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life,
for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words
sexcrime (sexual immorality) and goodsex (chastity).
Sexcrime covered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It
covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other
perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for
its own sake. There was no need to enumerate them separately,
since they were all equally culpable, and, in principle, all
punishable by death. In the C vocabulary, which consisted of
scientific and technical words, it might be necessary to give
specialized names to certain sexual aberrations, but the
ordinary citizen had no need of them. He knew what was meant by
goodsex -- that is to say, normal intercourse between
man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children, and
without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else
was sexcrime. In Newspeak it was seldom possible to
follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it
was heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were
nonexistent.
No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically neutral. A
great many were euphemisms. Such words, for instance, as
joycamp (forced-labour camp) or Minipax Ministry
of Peace, i. e. Ministry of War) meant almost the exact
opposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on the
other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of
the real nature of Oceanic society. An example was
prolefeed, meaning the rubbishy entertainment and
spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses. Other
words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation 'good'
when applied to the Party and 'bad' when applied to its
enemies. But in addition there were great numbers of words
which at first sight appeared to be mere abbreviations and
which derived their ideological colour not from their meaning,
but from their structure.
So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or
might have political significance of any kind was fitted into
the B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of
people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public
building, was invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that
is, a single easily pronounced word with the smallest number of
syllables that would preserve the original derivation. In the
Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records Department, in
which Winston Smith worked, was called Recdep, the
Fiction Department was called Ficdep, the Teleprogrammes
Department was called Teledep, and so on. This was not
done solely with the object of saving time. Even in the early
decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases
had been one of the characteristic features of political
language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use
abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian
countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such
words as Nazi, Gestapo, Comin- tern, Inprecorr,
Agitprop. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as
it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a
conscious purpose. It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a
name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting
out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it.
The words Communist International, for instance, call up
a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags,
barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word
Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a
tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine.
It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as
limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. Comintern is
a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought,
whereas Communist International is a phrase over which
one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the same way,
the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are
fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry
of Truth. This accounted not only for the habit of
abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost
exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily
pronounceable.
In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other
than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always
sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so,
since what was required, above all for political purposes, was
short clipped words of unmistakable meaning which could be
uttered rapidly and which roused the minimum of echoes in the
speaker's mind. The words of the B vocabulary even gained in
force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much
alike. Almost invariably these words -- goodthink, Minipax,
prolefeed, sexcrime, joycamp, Ingsoc, bellyfeel,
thinkpol, and countless others -- were words of two or
three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between
the first syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a
gabbling style of speech, at once staccato and monotonous. And
this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention was to make
speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologically
neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.
For the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or
sometimes necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party
member called upon to make a political or ethical judgement
should be able to spray forth the correct opinions as
automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His
training fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost
foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with their
harsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord
with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process still further.
So did the fact of having very few words to choose from.
Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new
ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak,
indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its
vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each
reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the
smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped
to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without
involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly
admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ' to
quack like a duck'. Like various other words in the B
vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning.
Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox
ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when The Times
referred to one of the orators of the Party as a
doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and
valued compliment.
The C vocabulary.
The C vocabulary was supplementary
to the others and consisted entirely of scientific and
technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use
today, and were constructed from the same roots, but the usual
care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of
undesirable meanings. They followed the same grammatical rules
as the words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C
words had any currency either in everyday speech or in
political speech. Any scientific worker or technician could
find all the words he needed in the list devoted to his own
speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the
words occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words were
common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the
function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought,
irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no
word for 'Science', any meaning that it could possibly bear
being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.
From the foregoing account it will be seen that in
Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very
low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible
to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy.
It would have been possible, for example, to say Big Brother
is ungood. But this statement, which to an orthodox ear
merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been
sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words
were not available. Ideas inimical to Ingsoc could only be
entertained in a vague wordless form, and could only be named
in very broad terms which lumped together and condemned whole
groups of heresies without defining them in doing so. One
could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by
illegitimately translating some of the words back into
Oldspeak. For example, All mans are equal was a possible
Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which All
men are redhaired is a possible Oldspeak sentence.
It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a
palpable untruth-i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight,
or strength. The concept of political equality no longer
existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged
out of the word equal. In 1984, when Oldspeak was still
the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically
existed that in using Newspeak words one might remember their
original meanings. In practice it was not difficult for any
person well grounded in doublethink to avoid doing this,
but within a couple of generations even the possibility of such
a lapse would have vaished. A person growing up with Newspeak
as his sole language would no more know that equal had
once had the secondary meaning of 'politically equal', or that
free had once meant 'intellectually free', than for
instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware
of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and
rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it
would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were
nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be foreseen
that with the passage of time the distinguishing
characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more
pronounced -- its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings
more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper
uses always diminishing.
When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the
last link with the past would have been severed. History had
already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the
past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long
as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to
read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced
to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It was
impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak
unless it either referred to some technical process or some
very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox
(goodthinkful would be the NewsPeak expression) in
tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before
approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole.
Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to
ideological translation -- that is, alteration in sense as well
as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the
Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with
certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers
from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of
Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right
of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new
Government. . .
It would have been quite impossible to render this into
Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The
nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the
whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full
translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby
Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute
government.
A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed,
already being transformed in this way. Considerations of
prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain
historical figures, while at the same time bringing their
achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various
writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens,
and some others were therefore in process of translation: when
the task had been completed, their original writings, with all
else that survived of the literature of the past, would be
destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult
business, and it was not expected that they would be finished
before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century.
There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian
literature -- indispensable technical manuals, and the like --
that had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order
to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the
final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as
2050.
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