Newspeak, Our Native Language
Milchar
Formerly, most linguists held the opinion that people think with the words of their language. Say, the Israelis are thinking in Hebrew, while the Arabs are thinking in Arabic; this is why they don't understand each other :-) Later, this hypothesis was disproved, but it does not mean that our language has no influence on our thinking. Everybody can notice the difficulty to think about a concept that does not have a suitable word in the language. Possibly, the habit to think about "unnamed" things does not form during the development of thinking capabilities in childhood.
Besides this, not only conscious notions and images are enabled during the process of thinking, but also subconscious ones as well. However, the language can influence our subconsciousness very effectively; the techniques of NLP, 25th frame, hidden phrases at an increased or decreased speed, etc. exploit this opportunity.
In his novel '1984', George Orwell described the Newspeak language, composed in such a way that it turns people's thinking only to a single direction, following the ideology of the authorities. At Orwell's time, the science of psycholinguistics was not developed yet. Now, the Inner Party could construct such a Newspeak that would be much more effective in restricting the ways of thought; everything known by now about psychological aspects of language can be used for this goal.
A natural spoken language (unlike, for example, programming languages) expresses notions not precisely. It contains ambiguities, words with a too wide field of possible meanings, and logically incorrect grammatical constructions. This all provides vast opportunities for poetry and other artistic creativity, but can also be used for political purposes, in order to indirectly restrict the freedom of thought. Elements of such totalitarian jargon, similar to Orwell's Newspeak, can be found in every existing human language.
'How do you know right from wrong?' — this is one of the first books that a child takes to read. From the earliest age, children are being accustomed to thinking in bipolar notions: right vs. wrong, good vs. bad/evil, etc. In addition, words with an indistinct meaning, such as conscience, honesty, fairness, morality etc., are also taught to the younger generation as though they were absolute and universal concepts with clearly positive or negative sense. At the same time, only philosophers can exactly define the meaning of these terms, and even they have many controversies about this. At best, a person without special education can only give examples of conscience or fairness, but can't explain their meaning without reciprocal references to each other ("fairness — this is when everybody is inspired with conscience and morality" :-))
Now, try to explain to 7-years old children: what is conscience? But they are already expected to have this notorious conscience! This is just another evidence that the society does not need this word to be understood. "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." /G. Orwell "1984"/ At first, members of the society must feel what the society requires for them; if they try to think over these requirements — it could be dangerous for the order in this society. This is why conscience, morality and other such words actually mean the same — subconscious acceptance of any obligations to the society, i.e. what is called "to bellyfeel Ingsoc" in Orwell's Newspeak.
Another similarity between our language and the one made up by Orwell is the presence of words produced from the above-mentioned ones by adding negative affixes, as incorrect, shameless, unfair, amoral etc. Don't they remind you of Newspeak's ungood, unproceed, malreport, malquote? Human psychology is such that people perceive the absence of anything negatively and rarely think about whether they really need the absent thing.
How many times every day do you talk about the monotheistic god? Never? But what about "oh god!", "goddam!", "thank god"? This is one of the techniques of the NLP: the requisite words are disguised in a phrase that makes absolutely different sense or no sense at all. But, as a result, some ideas arouse in subconsciousness; in this case, this is the idea that the biblical god exists in some form. This method is often used in advertisement and political propaganda, and appears to be highly effective [1].
In that way, when using the phrases like "oh god!", you subject yourself to monotheistic propaganda without being aware of it. Pagans, don't calm down: this is exactly and only the monotheistic god; about the gods of Paganism, people spoke differently.
The main problem with such monotheistic expressions is not their mere existence, but the lack of any alternative to them. As we remember, the creators of Newspeak included the words necessary for the party much less often than excluded the notions dangerous for it. English is quite a happy language in this regard; it's possible to speak it without ever mentioning god, Jesus etc. In some other languages, the situation is much worse: it's impossible to speak them not referring to the Christian or Moslem god, because many absolutely necessary words are derived from religious terms and have no "atheistic" synonyms [2]. Even Orwell did not hit upon the idea to design the Newspeak by sych a way that it would be impossible not to mention the Big Brother or the party, but the monotheistic religions were able to disfigure human languages to such a degree.
There is another word that bears a great influence on your subconsciousness. You are hearing this word for your whole life since early childhood. This word is your name.
What do most of modern Western names mean? Michael is "god's mercy", Gabriel is "god's force", Nathalie is "god's gift". This is who we are for those who call us with the name given by our parents! It does not matter that all these meanings are valid in a language unknown for us (ancient Hebrew). The main thing is that they correspond to characters of the biblical mythology. Important is where these words came from (i.e. what subconscious associations they awake) rather than what they literally mean. Even the names without obvious religious meaning (such as Andrew, Helene, Catherine) are not neutral, because they are taken from the church literature as well. Generally, each person with a Christian/Judaic/Moslem name is perceived by the others as a Christian/Jew/Moslem.
Meanwhile, the folks not affected by monotheism take the question of choosing a name for a newborn baby very seriously. They believe that a person's name is influencing that person's destiny for the whole life, and that not only the literal meaning of the name is important, but also the temper and personal traits of the historical or legendary character whose name was borrowed. The tradition of some folks to change a person's name in crucial moments of life has a practical reason as well.
It's not a mere caprice that the Communists began to invent "revolutionary" names after taking power in Russia. They understood that one associates one's name with the image of oneself, and tried to change this image according to their ideology by calling people with appropriate names.
Also, the Communists started (and many state authorities everywhere the world continued) the process of inventing abbreviated words, such as FBI, KGB etc. As already Orwell noticed, people pronounce abbreviations without thinking about their meaning. Not coincidentally, old abbreviations are often replaced with new ones; their creators aim to implement words that make no associations in people's brains.
Politeness is also worth mentioning. Not only does it disguise the real attitude to the interlocutor, but also smuggles some ideas into subconsciousness.
The English pronoun you is a form of plural number. So it's polite — to address a person as though it were a group of people. Formerly, in English the pronoun thou was used for a single person instead of you — but only when talking to the family members and friends. The same way it's spoken in most languages of the world: only a stranger is worth mentioning in plural form, but not your closest relatives and friends. This is how the rules of politeness promote the idea that strangers (e.g. the society) are worth greater respect than a single person or the people whom you like.
As already mentioned, in Orwell's novel the designers of Newspeak invented new words not so much as banned old ones. But in order to exclude some concepts from thinking, it's not necessary to exterminate the corresponding words. It can be done another way — by turning these words into meaningless junk.
Exactly this happened to the words that denoted genitals and sexual actions. They lost their original meaning and turned into swearwords. Emotional coloration of a word outweighs its sense sometimes. Moralists shed their crocodile tears over "foul language", but in fact they got what they wanted: since the word fuck started to mean insulting, sexuality has linked with negative associations in subconsciousness. What can people think about the process that can't be called other way than with a swearword?
Unfortunately, such newer expressions as to make love and to have sex are not appreciably better. They introduce the tinge of awkwardness and shyness, instead of the feeling of joy and liberation [3].
Thus the existing human languages are far from perfection. Their main problem is not the complexity of grammar or spelling, and even not the presence of polysemantic words (homonyms) — but their being an instrument of restricting and manipulating people's thought.
However, artificial languages, which has been created in abundance for the last two centuries, are by no means better. In Esperanto, for example, most words can be classified into pairs of antonyms with a clear "positive" or "negative" meaning either; most of "negative" words are formed by adding a negation prefix to the corresponding "positive" ones. Was not it Esperanto that prompted Orwell the idea of Newspeak? After all, the language of the Inner Party resembles many other traits of Dr. Zamenhof's invention: synonyms shortage, possibility to produce any grammatical form from any root even when it makes no sense, creating words for things according to their usual purpose (skribi — "to write", skribilo — "pencil"; we can see the same in Newspeak: the word writer means "pencil").
In addition, Esperanto contains many other flaws typical for natural languages; for example, its sexual vocabulary is the same way poorly developed and has already turned into swearwords.
Other artificial languages, such as Interlingua, Occidental, Ido — can work better than Esperanto in some aspects, but have no significant advantages over natural tongues, because their creators practiced a monotheistic religion and introduced its dogmas into the vocabulary and structure of their language projects.
The task of making our language more reasonable can arise soon. The current tendencies of political correctness resemble Orwell's doublespeak and lead to such confusion that the language is going to suit less and less for normal exchange of information. Probably, a serious reform of natural languages or implementation of a new artificial international language can become necessary in the future.
[1] For example, a task from a war-time Vietnamese school course of arithmetic: "One can kill 5 American invaders from one grenade-launcher. How many grenade-launchers are needed to kill 20 American invaders?" Kids are thinking how to solve the problem, not whether it's really necessary to kill the Americans.
[2] An example of such a language is Irish Gaelic. Any greetings in it mention either god, virgin Mary or st. Patrick; it's impossible to say simply "hello!" or "hi!". Many words are produced from the word "god" and have no "atheistic" synonyms. This is why the translators of 'Harry Potter' into Irish Gaelic hit upon tremendous difficulties, because J. K. Rowling purposedly did not mention any god in her series of novels. They had to completely rewrite some scenes in order to exclude any greetings from them. But even this was not enough: new words were coined instead of really existing in the language, because those ones were derived from "god". As a result, the translators had to mention in the beginning that the language of wizards is a bit different from the one of the muggles. Nevertheless, some words of religious origin did appear the translated text, because the translators could not find any replacement for them.
[3] The translations of the Kama Sutra into European languages are inaccurate. At first, it was translated into English in the 19th century — the Victorian epoch, when moral restrictions in the British society were the severest. This is why some pieces of the original text were omitted, because the translators could not even imagine such a kind of sexual actions, and some other parts were translated imprecisely due to the lack of necessary words in the English language of that time (even now the situation is not appreciably better).
Publications of the Kama Sutra in other European languages usually are repeated translations from English, and, therefore, diverge even farther from the original.