Does newspeak actually decrease intellectual capacity? (No)
In George Orwell’s book 1984, he describes a totalitarian society that, among other initiatives to suppress the population, implements “Newspeak”, a heavily simplified version of the English language, designed with the stated intent of limiting the citizens’ capacity to think for themselves (thereby ensuring stability for the reigning regime)
In short, the ethos of newspeak can be summarized as: “Minimize vocabulary to minimize range of thought and expression”. There are two different, closely related, ideas, both of which the book implies, that are worth separating here.
The first (which I think is to some extent reasonable) is that by removing certain words from the language, which serve as effective handles for pro-democracy, pro-free-speech, pro-market concepts, the regime makes it harder to communicate and verbally think about such ideas (I think in the absence of other techniques used by Orwell’s Oceania to suppress independent thought, such subjects can still be meaningfully communicated and pondered, just less easily than with a rich vocabulary provided)
The second idea, which I worry is an incorrect takeaway people may get from 1984, is that by shortening the dictionary of vocabulary that people are encouraged to use (absent any particular bias towards removing handles for subversive ideas), one will reduce the intellectual capacity of people using that variant of the language.
A slight tangent whose relevance will become clear: If you listen to a native Chinese speaker, then compare the sound of their speech to a native Hawaiian speaker, there are many apparent differences in the sound of the two languages. Chinese has a rich phonological inventory containing 19 consonants, 5 vowels, and quite famously, 4 different tones (pitch patterns) which are used for each syllable, for a total of 5400 (approximately) possible syllables, including diphthongs and multi-syllabic vowels. Compare this to Hawaiian, which has 8 consonants, and 5 vowels, and no tones. Including diphthongs, there are 200 possible Hawaiian syllables.
One might naïvely expect that Mandarin speakers can communicate information more quickly than Hawaiian speakers, at a rate of 12.4 bits / syllable vs. 7.6 bits / syllable—however, this is neglecting the speed at which syllables are spoken- Hawaiian speakers speak much faster than Chinese speakers, and accounting for this difference in cadence, Hawaiian and Mandarin are much closer to each other in speed of communication than their phonologies would suggest.
Back to 1984. If we cut the dictionary down, so it is only 1/20th the size it is now (while steering clear of the thoughtpolice and any bias in removal of words), what should we expect will happen? One may naïvely think, that just as banning the words “democracy”, “freedom”, and “justice” would inhibit people’s ability to think about Enlightenment Values, banning most of the words should inhibit our ability to think about most of the things.
But that is not what I would expect to see happen. One should expect to see compound words take the place of deprecated words, speaking speeds increased, and to accommodate the increased cadence of speech, tricky sequences of sounds will be elided (blurred / simplified), allowing for complex ideas to ultimately be communicated at a pace that rivals that of standard English. Plus, it’d be (massively) easier for non-Anglophones to learn, which would be a big plus.
If I had more time, I’d write about why I think we nonetheless find the concept of Simplified English to be somewhat aversive- speaking a simplified version of a language becomes an antisignal for intelligence and social status, so we come to look down on people who attempt to utilize simplified language, while celebrating those who flex their mental capacity by using rare vocabulary.
Since I’m tired and would rather sleep than write more, I’ll end with a rhetorical question: would you rather be in a community that excels at signaling, or a community that actually gets stuff done?
Yes, the important thing is the concepts, not their technical implementation in the language.
Like, in Esperanto, you can construct “building for” + “the people who are” + “the opposite of” + “health” = hospital. And the advantage is that people who never heard that specific word can still guess its meaning quite reliably.
we nonetheless find the concept of Simplified English to be somewhat aversive
I think the main disadvantage is that it would exist in parallel, as a lower-status version of the standard English. Which means that less effort would be put into “fixing bugs” or “implementing features”, because for people capable of doing so, it would be more profitable to switch to the standard English instead.
(Like those software projects that have a free Community version and a paid Professional version, and if you complain about a bug in the free version that is known for years, you are told to deal with it or buy the paid version. In a parallel universe where only the free version exists, the bug would have been fixed there.)
would you rather be in a community that excels at signaling, or a community that actually gets stuff done?
How would you get stuff done if people won’t join you because you suck at signaling? :( Sometimes you need many people to join you. Sometimes you only need a few specialists, but you still need a large base group to choose from.
As an aside, I think it’s worth pointing out that Esperanto’s use of the prefix mal- to indicate the opposite of something (akin to Newspeak’s un-) is problematic: two words that mean the exact opposite will sound very similar, and in an environment where there’s noise, the meaning of a sentence can change drastically based on a few lost bits of information, plus it also slows down communication unnecessarily.
In my notes, I once had the idea of a “phonetic inverse”: according to simple, well defined rules, each word could be transformed into an opposite word, which sounds as different as possible from the original word, and has the opposite meaning. That rule was intended for an engineered language akin to Sona, so the rules would need to be worked a bit to have something good and similar for English, but I prefer such a system to Esperanto’s inversion rules
The other problem is that opposite is ill defined depending and requires someone else to know which dimension you’re inverting along as well as what you consider neutral/0 for that dimension
While this would be an inconvenience for the on-boarding process for a new mode of communication, I actually don’t think it’s that big of a deal for people who are already used to the dialect (which would probably make up the majority of communication) and have a mutual understanding of what is meant by [inverse(X)] even when X could in principle have more than one inverse.
That makes the concept much less useful though. Might as well just have two different words that are unrelated. The point of having the inverse idea is to be able to guess words right?
I’d say the main benefit it provides is making learning easier—instead of learning “foo” means ‘good’ and “bar” means ‘bad’, one only needs to learn “foo” = good, and inverse(“foo”) = bad, which halves the total number of tokens needed to learn a lexicon. One still needs to learn the association between concepts and their canonical inverses, but that information is more easily compressible
Does newspeak actually decrease intellectual capacity? (No)
In George Orwell’s book 1984, he describes a totalitarian society that, among other initiatives to suppress the population, implements “Newspeak”, a heavily simplified version of the English language, designed with the stated intent of limiting the citizens’ capacity to think for themselves (thereby ensuring stability for the reigning regime)
In short, the ethos of newspeak can be summarized as: “Minimize vocabulary to minimize range of thought and expression”. There are two different, closely related, ideas, both of which the book implies, that are worth separating here.
The first (which I think is to some extent reasonable) is that by removing certain words from the language, which serve as effective handles for pro-democracy, pro-free-speech, pro-market concepts, the regime makes it harder to communicate and verbally think about such ideas (I think in the absence of other techniques used by Orwell’s Oceania to suppress independent thought, such subjects can still be meaningfully communicated and pondered, just less easily than with a rich vocabulary provided)
The second idea, which I worry is an incorrect takeaway people may get from 1984, is that by shortening the dictionary of vocabulary that people are encouraged to use (absent any particular bias towards removing handles for subversive ideas), one will reduce the intellectual capacity of people using that variant of the language.
A slight tangent whose relevance will become clear: If you listen to a native Chinese speaker, then compare the sound of their speech to a native Hawaiian speaker, there are many apparent differences in the sound of the two languages. Chinese has a rich phonological inventory containing 19 consonants, 5 vowels, and quite famously, 4 different tones (pitch patterns) which are used for each syllable, for a total of 5400 (approximately) possible syllables, including diphthongs and multi-syllabic vowels. Compare this to Hawaiian, which has 8 consonants, and 5 vowels, and no tones. Including diphthongs, there are 200 possible Hawaiian syllables.
One might naïvely expect that Mandarin speakers can communicate information more quickly than Hawaiian speakers, at a rate of 12.4 bits / syllable vs. 7.6 bits / syllable—however, this is neglecting the speed at which syllables are spoken- Hawaiian speakers speak much faster than Chinese speakers, and accounting for this difference in cadence, Hawaiian and Mandarin are much closer to each other in speed of communication than their phonologies would suggest.
Back to 1984. If we cut the dictionary down, so it is only 1/20th the size it is now (while steering clear of the thoughtpolice and any bias in removal of words), what should we expect will happen? One may naïvely think, that just as banning the words “democracy”, “freedom”, and “justice” would inhibit people’s ability to think about Enlightenment Values, banning most of the words should inhibit our ability to think about most of the things.
But that is not what I would expect to see happen. One should expect to see compound words take the place of deprecated words, speaking speeds increased, and to accommodate the increased cadence of speech, tricky sequences of sounds will be elided (blurred / simplified), allowing for complex ideas to ultimately be communicated at a pace that rivals that of standard English. Plus, it’d be (massively) easier for non-Anglophones to learn, which would be a big plus.
If I had more time, I’d write about why I think we nonetheless find the concept of Simplified English to be somewhat aversive- speaking a simplified version of a language becomes an antisignal for intelligence and social status, so we come to look down on people who attempt to utilize simplified language, while celebrating those who flex their mental capacity by using rare vocabulary.
Since I’m tired and would rather sleep than write more, I’ll end with a rhetorical question: would you rather be in a community that excels at signaling, or a community that actually gets stuff done?
Yes, the important thing is the concepts, not their technical implementation in the language.
Like, in Esperanto, you can construct “building for” + “the people who are” + “the opposite of” + “health” = hospital. And the advantage is that people who never heard that specific word can still guess its meaning quite reliably.
I think the main disadvantage is that it would exist in parallel, as a lower-status version of the standard English. Which means that less effort would be put into “fixing bugs” or “implementing features”, because for people capable of doing so, it would be more profitable to switch to the standard English instead.
(Like those software projects that have a free Community version and a paid Professional version, and if you complain about a bug in the free version that is known for years, you are told to deal with it or buy the paid version. In a parallel universe where only the free version exists, the bug would have been fixed there.)
How would you get stuff done if people won’t join you because you suck at signaling? :( Sometimes you need many people to join you. Sometimes you only need a few specialists, but you still need a large base group to choose from.
As an aside, I think it’s worth pointing out that Esperanto’s use of the prefix mal- to indicate the opposite of something (akin to Newspeak’s un-) is problematic: two words that mean the exact opposite will sound very similar, and in an environment where there’s noise, the meaning of a sentence can change drastically based on a few lost bits of information, plus it also slows down communication unnecessarily.
In my notes, I once had the idea of a “phonetic inverse”: according to simple, well defined rules, each word could be transformed into an opposite word, which sounds as different as possible from the original word, and has the opposite meaning. That rule was intended for an engineered language akin to Sona, so the rules would need to be worked a bit to have something good and similar for English, but I prefer such a system to Esperanto’s inversion rules
The other problem is that opposite is ill defined depending and requires someone else to know which dimension you’re inverting along as well as what you consider neutral/0 for that dimension
While this would be an inconvenience for the on-boarding process for a new mode of communication, I actually don’t think it’s that big of a deal for people who are already used to the dialect (which would probably make up the majority of communication) and have a mutual understanding of what is meant by [inverse(X)] even when X could in principle have more than one inverse.
That makes the concept much less useful though. Might as well just have two different words that are unrelated. The point of having the inverse idea is to be able to guess words right?
I’d say the main benefit it provides is making learning easier—instead of learning “foo” means ‘good’ and “bar” means ‘bad’, one only needs to learn “foo” = good, and inverse(“foo”) = bad, which halves the total number of tokens needed to learn a lexicon. One still needs to learn the association between concepts and their canonical inverses, but that information is more easily compressible