2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
Exactly 70 years ago, on June 8, 1949, George Orwell's novel 1984, one of the most significant books of the 20th century, was published. Some believe that this book, which described a fantastic, but at the same time so realistic totalitarian system, to some extent prevented its appearance in reality. One of Orwell's key ideas is the assumption that you can control people's thoughts by controlling the language they speak. In other words, eliminating “wrong” words from the dictionary automatically eliminates the possibility of “wrong” ideas coming up. Is this method of mind control possible? Can Newspeak exist outside of the Orwellian world? Are there in real language systems the features described by the author of 1984? The N + 1 editors posed these questions to the linguist Alexander Piperski.
The idea of a new language, which should exclude the possibility of "thought-crime", is so important to Orwell that he included its description as a separate appendix to the novel. Here is how one of the heroes of the novel describes the principles of the newspeak language, which is called "newspeak" in the translation of Viktor Golyshev:
We destroy words - dozens, hundreds every day … Did you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary is shrinking every year? Do you not understand that the task of Newspeak is to narrow the horizons of thought? In the end, we will make thought-crime simply impossible - there will be no words left for it. Each necessary concept will be expressed in one single word, the meaning of the word will be strictly defined, and the secondary meanings will be abolished and forgotten … The revolution will end when the language becomes perfect … The atmosphere of thinking will be different. There will be no thinking in our modern sense at all.
The hypothesis that thinking is largely dependent on language was expressed in various forms at the beginning of the 20th century; today it is known as the hypothesis of linguistic relativity, or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The adherents of this approach assumed that if the language does not have a designation for a certain concept, then people are not able to think about it. Roughly speaking, the fact that the Russian language has the word "blue", but English does not, may mean that the speakers of these two languages can think about the world in different ways. Orwell took the next logical step by suggesting that correcting language could influence thinking.
If at least once in history someone really managed to do this, they would have got a perfectly working totalitarian sect or a totalitarian state. But, apparently, this is still impossible, and dissidents always manage to express their thoughts. On the contrary, any prohibitions on words only draw attention to them and make them more tempting for use and discussion, substitutions for euphemisms. New derivative words constantly appear in the language, the meanings of the old ones change. There is a taboo vocabulary in the Russian language, but how many euphemisms have appeared to convey the same meaning?
It is very difficult to ban words en masse - but it is quite possible to imagine that in a given situation certain topics are prohibited, and the conversation is reduced to a set of ritual clichés; in fact, this means that other words in this situation are unacceptable. The most important sign of totalitarian discourse is precisely that the set of ritual situations is very wide: you must speak in standard meaningless phrases from the rostrum, at a meeting, at a lecture. The only question is where this border lies: ritualized communication always exists (talking about the weather with unfamiliar people, for example), but if it spreads to too many situations, then we can talk about the victory of Newspeak.
Of course, there are languages for which, as in Newspeak, whole layers of vocabulary are absent - for example, they may not have philosophical or scientific terminology. For example, there were no theological concepts in the Slavic languages until Cyril, Methodius and their students created them by copying or borrowing Greek words.
Languages in which no philosophical texts are written, of course, exist - but if they start to create such texts in these languages, they easily borrow the necessary words or create them from their roots. One can imagine the reverse process, that the once culturally significant language becomes less significant and lags behind other languages in terms of lexical stock. For example, in the days of Aristotle, Greek was the most important language of science and technology, but now it is not, and it is clear that for some English technical terms, Greek Wikipedia does not even know equivalents - for example, touchpad or trackball. But this is the result of a natural process, not deliberate interference.
The idea that a person cannot conceive of something for which he does not have a word is refuted by the fact that we have new words for new concepts: sometimes they, of course, are borrowed (like Russian "hype" and "harassment"), but in in some language, they also appear for the first time - as, for example, the words hype and harassment appeared in English. Changes in thinking and the emergence of new concepts are followed by changes in language.
Orwellian Newspeak has another important and interesting feature: grammatical regularity, for example, it should not have irregular verbs like in modern English STEAL - STOLEN, nouns MAN - MEN and adjectives GOOD - BETTER, but should have STEALED forms, MANS and GOODER.
A similar experiment was carried out in reality: the artificial language Esperanto was created according to the same rules and without any exceptions. But even in it, 100 years later, dialects and discrepancies appeared. Language processes are designed in such a way that they can affect different parts of the language system in different ways, so some words can retain archaic forms (and turn into exceptions), while all the rest have taken regular forms. Therefore, it would be naive to hope that a certain language can exist for a long time without generating exceptions and irregularities, and this Orwell's idea is also unrealizable.
However, Orwell grasped the social nature of Newspeak very well: it seemed that we would expect that in totalitarian states the broad masses would be subject to restrictions, and more senior people would enjoy more freedom. But with language it turns out to be exactly the opposite, and it is the totalitarian establishment that finds itself in the trap of ritual language: the upper strata are almost constantly in situations where they are obliged to repeat that “Old thinkers will not penetrate Ingsoc” or “The great teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin have always been and will remain for us a guide to action,”and ordinary people are much more free. Orwell's lower class, the Prolam, do not have to learn Newspeak.
