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Orwell's Answers > Orwell's Novels  > Nineteen Eighty-Four 

On which model is Newspeak based? I think, it might be a parody of Basic English. Is there anything to prove this assumption?
(Loki, aged 25+)

Yes you are partly right about that, you could see Newspeak this way. I was in fact mocking the various so-called universal languages which have been proposed over the years.

C.K.Ogden, who proposed Basic English, thought English had evolved towards structural simplicity and semantic purity, and I was a supporter of his theories for a while. But I saw in it a certain authoritarian, even imperialistic streak.
To illustrate the likeness from my novel: Ogden stated that verbs are wasteful - the character Syme says that ''the great wastage is in verbs''; Ogden also recommended that all antonyms should be formed regularly and transparently, for example, straight/unstraight, etc - Syme : ''What need is there for a word like ''bad''? ''Ungood'' will do just as well''.
Wittgenstein was another advocate of a logically perfect language, which presented a closed system that can say nothing of reality outside itself - Newspeak corresponds term by term with a certain political reality, designed to render inaccessible other realities.

Yours

George

 

 

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