A person growing up with Newspeak


AS HIS SOLE LANGUAGE
would no more know that EQUAL had once had the secondary meaning of 'politically equal', or that FREE had once meant 'intellectually free', than, for instance, a person who had never hard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to QUEEN & ROOK.

There would be many crimes & errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced - its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing.

When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelli- gible and untranslatable. It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some techni-cal process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox (GOODTHINKFUL would be the Newspeak expression) in ten-dency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole.

Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected
to ideological translation - that is,
alteration in sense
as well as
language.
18 mrt 2013 - bewerkt op 20 mrt 2013 - meld ongepast verhaal
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Asih, man, 81 jaar
   
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