Winston thought that Syme would be eventually vaporized since he was too smart but in reality Syme's work is completely useless. He is trying to make a make it so that talking in newspeak would make it impossible to rebel but that would be useless for three main reasons.
One: If people wanted to rebel they could just not speak in newspeak.
There wouldn't be much to prevent the common people from not speaking newspeak, even now with it being the official language of Oceania I don't think that even all of the party members predominantly speak it.
Two: Assuming there are measures in place to detect people talking in the old language if Newspeak is the only allowed language, what's to stop people from making up new words to express the concepts that don't have pre-existing words for them.
I say this even though, if they had the tech to detect people speaking the old language what's to stop them from detecting not newspeak.
Finally there's this reason: People could just combine words that exist in newspeak in different ways that wouldn't normally make sense with the grammatical structure.
The thought police could detect people using the old language and new words in newspeak, but can they really detect every little deviation in sentence structure? With additional problems of different dialects and people not being used to the language, this task would be impossible.
What do you think? Please comment down below.
Ooh, this is interesting. I really like the idea that rebels could use Newspeak against itself almost, and create new meanings by combining them in certain ways.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting idea -- language as rebellion. I like the suggestion of hope it provides -- though one depressing possibility is that if a regime is powerful enough, it actually encourages a degree of rebellion, because that's how they can exert power. Language becomes a way to detect insurgence, not to promote it. (I hope that's not true. That's super depressing.)
ReplyDeleteYes it makes sense that this particular measure would not be effective in suppressing the populous.
ReplyDeleteI think that makes sense. I'm interested to see how they plan to teach everyone a new language. I think that there will have to be some transition time between the current language and Newspeak but after that transition time is over I think they will punish people who create new words but maybe not people who use slightly different sentence structure. The goal is to basically create a bunch mindless drones so I think they will have very strict rules around speech.
ReplyDeleteYes, I thought it was interesting that we do not see many people using newspeak and it does not seem to be like they are enforcing it very much, just encouraging it. Their tech is pretty flawed and not that advanced enough to track that.
ReplyDeletei think this is really interesting and i definitely agree with you. The last part is especially interesting considering how much is said-without-actually-saying-it when you change emphasis or very small sentence structures even in english.
ReplyDeleteI imagine that they also intend to eliminate connotations of words to prevent nuance and subtlety from occurring, although this would be even harder to do. Further pokes holes in their plan regarding Newspeak.
DeleteFor your first point I think the idea was that the old Language would eventually disappear and no one would know it anymore, so it wouldn't be possible for anyone to not speak Newspeak, but it seems questionable whether they will actually be able to make that happen.
ReplyDeleteThat makes total sense. The human brain is amazing at finding ways to express different concepts. I mean we've created thousands of languages after all. Eliminating a word from the language doesn't mean that the concept is also eliminated. It just means that people now have to create a new word for that concept.
ReplyDeleteIn a society like the one in 1984, even the tiniest of rebellions could be meaningful (see also: Winston's journal). So, yeah, rebellion though language makes a lot of sense. However, I think that Newspeak is currently still being "phased in," and the 1984 government is aiming to make Newspeak more predominate in the future. If that happens, creating new words and such may not be as easy as you think, because the scope of many people's imaginations and emotions will be limited by how many Newspeak words they know to express them. Certain words in foreign languages are difficult to translate or fully understand without a fluent grasp of the language; there's no reason why that couldn't happen with Oldspeak.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the creation of Newspeak won't by itself prevent "thoughtcrime", because there will always be some way to work around the language. It seems like just another barrier to keep people from committing thoughtcrime. Considering how hard it already is for Winston to not get caught when he isn't even talking to other people about his thoughts, I think Newspeak in combination with other things might eventually make it close to impossible to commit thoughtcrime.
ReplyDeleteI’m fascinated by the idea of changing the entire structure of a language for the purpose of rebellion. A critical step from utopia/dystopia into a society more like ours today requires that people differentiate themselves from one another, and using a new language or dialect is a perfect way of doing so.
ReplyDeleteYeah I definitely agree with you that Syme's logic was silly, and you proposed some interesting strategies to get around what he's trying to establish. The idea that rebellion and discontent are dependent on vocabulary seems pretty foolish to me. I mean babies come into the world without a vocabulary and they seem to be upset almost all the time.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I don't exactly think the measures they put in place are enough and that could be a serious weak point for this society's integrity. But personally I think citizens might not want to take the risk of rebelling because they're being so heavily monitored in every aspect of their life and who knows what this society does to people who don't conform.
ReplyDeleteWhile I don't think an entire country of adults can change language at the snap of a finger, I do think the children of Oceania will be a lot more open to learning the language, and the generation after that may not need English at all. I would point to immigrant families where, typically, the people who immigrate as adults speak very poor English, while their children grow up surrounded by both languages, becoming fluent in both. Eventually, the original language loses it's value. I think, with enough time, and with enough pressure from the government, Newspeak will succeed.
ReplyDeleteTo me, Newspeak is the integral part of the state's plan to hold power in the long term. Authoritarian governments that try to hide information from people will never work in the long run, as they will be unable to defend themselves against the ideas of the masses when the time comes. However, through Newspeak, the government aims to try to prevent thoughts from forming at all in the populace, which could actually work to some extent (how can people rebel if they can't express ideas of autonomous thought and rebellion)?
ReplyDeleteI never thought about how not how the common people who continue to speak oldspeak would affect newspeak's goals. If a majority of the population continues understanding and using this language, I agree that it seems impossible to make it disappear. But I'm not sure about creating new words. In removing the word completely from the language newspeak aims to destroy the ideas themselves, and it could be hard to propagate brand new words describing concepts hardly anyone understands.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that preventing rebellion by removing the words used to describe it may not be very effective. People could just use newspeak when talking to others and think in oldspeak. Just erasing the word for a concept can't remove it from people's minds.
ReplyDeleteI agree that people will still be able to find ways to rebel against speaking Newspeak. If the people make up their own new language, how can the tech detect it when it doesn't know what it is? I guess the tech could detect when someone is speaking anything that it doesn't recognize as Newspeak (rather than just the old language), but people would probably find a way around it.
ReplyDelete