• 回复: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

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    甲酸钾乙酸钇 Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:43:39 +0000

    APPENDIX
    The Principles of Newspeak

    [size=+2]NEWSPEAKwas the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet theideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984there 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 forcewhich could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected thatNewspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English,as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gainedground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words andgrammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. Theversion in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions ofthe Newspeak Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained manysuperfluous words and archaic formations which were due to besuppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodiedin the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are concerned here.The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium ofexpression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devoteesof Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It wasintended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all andOldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought divergingfrom the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at leastso far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was soconstructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to everymeaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, whileexcluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving atthem by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of newwords, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by strippingsuch words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possibleof all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word freestill existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statementsas ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. Itcould not be used in its old sense of ‘ politically free’ or‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom nolonger existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessitynameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely hereticalwords, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and noword that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak wasdesigned 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, thoughmany 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 Avocabulary, the B vocabulary (also called compound words), and the Cvocabulary. It will be simpler to discuss each class separately, butthe grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in thesection devoted to the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good forall three categories.
    The A vocabulary.
    The A vocabulary consisted of the words needed for the business ofeveryday life—for such things as eating, drinking, working, putting onone’s clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening,cooking, and the like. It was composed almost entirely of words that wealready possess words like hit, run, dog, tree, sugar, house, field—butin comparison with the present-day English vocabulary their number wasextremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined.All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of them. Sofar as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply astaccato sound expressing one clearly understood concept. Itwould have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literarypurposes or for political or philosophical discussion. It was intendedonly to express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concreteobjects or physical actions.
    The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities. Thefirst of these was an almost complete interchangeability betweendifferent parts of speech. Any word in the language (in principle thisapplied even to very abstract words such as if or when)could be used either as verb, noun, adjective, or adverb. Between theverb and the noun form, when they were of the same root, there wasnever any variation, this rule of itself involving the destruction ofmany 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 wasfollowed here: in some cases it was the original noun that was chosenfor retention, in other cases the verb. Even where a noun and verb ofkindred meaning were not etymologically connected, one or other of themwas 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 littleneed for them, since almost any adjectival meaning could be arrived atby 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 doublepluscoldmeant, respectively, ‘very cold’ and ‘superlatively cold’. It was alsopossible, as in present-day English, to modify the meaning of almostany 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 naturalpair 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 inflexionsfollowed the same rules. Thus, in all verbs the preterite and the pastparticiple 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 inflectirregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrativeadjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. All of these followed theirancient 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 ofthe need for rapid and easy speech. A word which was difficult toutter, or was liable to be incorrectly heard, was held to be ipso factoa bad word: occasionally therefore, for the sake of euphony, extraletters were inserted into a word or an archaic formation was retained.But this need made itself felt chiefly in connexion with the Bvocabulary. 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 deliberatelyconstructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which notonly had in every case a political implication, but were intended toimpose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them. Withouta full understanding of the principles of Ingsoc it was difficult touse these words correctly. In some cases they couId be translated intoOldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary, but thisusually demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss ofcertain overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, oftenpacking whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the sametime more accurate and forcible than ordinary language.
    The B words were in all cases compound words. They consisted oftwo or more words, or portions of words, welded together in an easilypronounceable form. The resulting amalgam was always a noun-verb, andinflected 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 averb, ‘to think in an orthodox manner’. This inflected as follows:noun-verb, goodthink; past tense and past participle, goodthinked; present participle, goodthinking; adjective, goodthinkful; adverb, goodthinkwise; verbal noun, goodthinker.
    The B words were not constructed on any etymological plan. The words ofwhich they were made up could be any parts of speech, and could beplaced in any order and mutilated in any way which made them easy topronounce 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 policehad lost its second syllable. Because of the great difficuIty insecuring euphony, irregular formations were commoner in the Bvocabulary than in the A vocabulary. For example, the adjective formsof Minitrue, Minipax, and Miniluv were, respectively, Minitruthful, Minipeaceful, and Minilovely, simply because -trueful, -paxful, and -lovefulwere slightly awkward to pronounce. In principle, however, all B wordscould inflect, and all inflected in exactly the same way.
    Some of the B words had highly subtilized meanings, barelyintelligible 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 wouldbe: ‘Those whose ideas were formed before the Revolution cannot have afull emotional understanding of the principles of English Socialism.’But this is not an adequate translation. To begin with, in order tograsp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence quoted above, one wouldhave 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 anddecadence. But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of whicholdthink was one, was not so much to express meanings as todestroy them. These words, necessarily few in number, had had theirmeanings extended until they contained within themselves wholebatteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a singlecomprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten. The greatestdifficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not toinvent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what theymeant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words theycancelled 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 retainedfor the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meaningspurged out of them. Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religionhad simply ceased to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, incovering them, abolished them. All words grouping themselves round theconcepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in thesingle 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 aParty member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew whoknew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his ownworshipped ‘false gods’. He did not need to know that these gods werecalled Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the lesshe knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah andthe commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods withother names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the sameway, the party member knew what constituted right conduct, and inexceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departurefrom it were possible. His sexual life, for example, was entirelyregulated by the two Newspeak words sexcrime (sexual immorality) and goodsex (chastity). Sexcrimecovered all sexual misdeeds whatever. It covered fornication, adultery,homosexuality, and other perversions, and, in addition, normalintercourse practised for its own sake. There was no need to enumeratethem separately, since they were all equally culpable, and, inprinciple, all punishable by death. In the C vocabulary, whichconsisted of scientific and technical words, it might be necessary togive specialized names to certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinarycitizen had no need of them. He knew what was meant by goodsex—thatis to say, normal intercourse between man and wife, for the solepurpose of begetting children, and without physical pleasure on thepart 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 exactopposite of what they appeared to mean. Some words, on the other hand,displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature ofOceanic society. An example was prolefeed, meaning the rubbishyentertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to themasses. 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 sightappeared to be mere abbreviations and which derived their ideologicalcolour not from their meaning, but from their structure.
    So far as it could be contrived, everything that had or mighthave political significance of any kind was fitted into the Bvocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of people, ordoctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, wasinvariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easilypronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that wouldpreserve the original derivation. In the Ministry of Truth, forexample, the Records Department, in which Winston Smith worked, wascalled 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 wordsand phrases had been one of the characteristic features of politicallanguage; and it had been noticed that the tendency to useabbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countriesand totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words as Nazi, Gestapo, Comintern, Inprecorr, Agitprop.In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it wereinstinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious purpose. Itwas perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtlyaltered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that wouldotherwise cling to it. The words Communist International, forinstance, 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 awell-defined body of doctrine. It refers to something almost as easilyrecognized, 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 Internationalis 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 wheneverpossible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken tomake every word easily pronounceable.
    In Newspeak, euphony outweighed every consideration other thanexactitude of meaning. Regularity of grammar was always sacrificed toit when it seemed necessary. And rightly so, since what was required,above all for political purposes, was short clipped words ofunmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which rousedthe minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. The words of the Bvocabulary even gained in force from the fact that nearly all of themwere 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 thestress distributed equally between the first syllable and the last. Theuse of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech, at once staccato andmonotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The intention wasto make speech, and especially speech on any subject not ideologicallyneutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For thepurposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimesnecessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called uponto make a political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forththe correct opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forthbullets. His training fitted him to do this, the language gave him analmost foolproof instrument, and the texture of the words, with theirharsh sound and a certain wilful ugliness which was in accord with thespirit 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 ofreducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak, indeed, differedfrom most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smallerinstead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since thesmaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought.Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynxwithout involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was franklyadmitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ‘ to quack like a duck’. Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeakwas ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which werequacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and whenthe 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 entirelyof scientific and technical terms. These resembled the scientific termsin use today, and were constructed from the same roots, but the usualcare was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of undesirablemeanings. They followed the same grammatical rules as the words in theother two vocabularies. Very few of the C words had any currency eitherin everyday speech or in political speech. Any scientific worker ortechnician could find all the words he needed in the list devoted tohis own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of thewords occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words were commonto all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the function ofScience as a habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of itsparticular branches. There was, indeed, no word for ‘Science’, anymeaning that it could possibly bear being already sufficiently coveredby the word Ingsoc.
    From the foregoing account it will be seen that in Newspeak theexpression of unorthodox opinions, above a very low level, waswell-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter heresies of avery 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 aself-evident absurdity, could not have been sustained by reasonedargument, because the necessary words were not available. Ideasinimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague wordless form,and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped together andcondemned whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing so.One could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes byillegitimately translating some of the words back into Oldspeak. Forexample, All mans are equal was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which All men are redhairedis a possible Oldspeak sentence. It did not contain a grammaticalerror, but it expressed a palpable untruth—i.e. that all men are ofequal size, weight, or strength. The concept of political equality nolonger existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purgedout of the word equal. In 1984, when Oldspeak was still thenormal means of communication, the danger theoretically existed that inusing Newspeak words one might remember their original meanings. Inpractice it was not difficult for any person well grounded in doublethinkto avoid doing this, but within a couple of generations even thepossibility of such a lapse would have vaished. A person growing upwith Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of ‘politically equal’, or that freehad once meant ‘intellectually free’, than for instance, a person whohad never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meaningsattaching to queen and rook. There would be many crimesand errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply becausethey were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to beforeseen that with the passage of time the distinguishingcharacteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced—itswords growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, andthe chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing.
    When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the lastlink with the past would have been severed. History had already beenrewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived hereand there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one’sknowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future suchfragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible anduntranslatable. It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeakinto Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process orsome very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox (goodthinkfulwould be the NewsPeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meantthat no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as awhole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected toideological translation—that is, alteration in sense as well aslanguage. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declarationof Independence:
    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are createdequal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienablerights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit ofhappiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are institutedamong men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. Thatwhenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, itis the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute newGovernment. . .It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak whilekeeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come todoing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink.A full translation could only be an ideological translation, wherebyJefferson’s words would be changed into a panegyric on absolutegovernment.
    A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, alreadybeing transformed in this way. Considerations of prestige made itdesirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, whileat the same time bringing their achievements into line with thephilosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton,Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process oftranslation: when the task had been completed, their original writings,with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would bedestroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult business, andit was not expected that they would be finished before the first orsecond decade of the twenty-first century. There were also largequantities of merely utilitarian literature—indispensable technicalmanuals, and the like—that had to be treated in the same way. It waschiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translationthat the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a dateas 2050.