And don’t get me started on that newspeak bullshit. Seriously, when the fuck had any communist ever proposed reducing the expressional function of a language? What the actual fuck was he going on about? Yet another shameless strawman.
Was he thinking of simplified Chinese maybe? That’s the opposite of newspeak! It was intended specifically to reduce the difficulty in learning one of the most difficult to learn scripts in the world and increase literacy rates, and critically, increase access to the language and therefore access to information written in said language! It absolutely did not delete words or mess with the grammar system, or how the language is spoken. Simplified Chinese only affects how characters are written (and isn’t the first overhaul of the Chinese writing system BTW), and simplified and traditional Chinese characters have a one to one correspondence, and can be converted between each other with a simple lookup table. It’s logically the same as going from cursive to print text in English, not English to Newspeak.
Again, I’ve read Pokémon fanfiction with more basis in reality.
I think George either misunderstood the simplification of the Chinese language, purposefully made it it look like it was the removal of Chinese words or like any modern western journalist, making stuff up to make communism in general look like it’s evil
I mean, I doubt he knew anyone who speaks Chinese or was arsed to do any research. “Simplified Chinese” does sound on the surface level like they just dumbed down the language, so I’m assuming he just ran with that assumption because it’s convenient for his narrative. A more accurate and less ambiguous term would be Simplified Chinese Script.
By the way, Korea went through the same thing. Korean used to be written out using Chinese script. But the language structure of Korean wasn’t served very well by Chinese characters, because Korean is an agglutinative language while Chinese is an analytical language. So they made their own script that’s specifically designed for the language.
I mean, is there an actual problem with not having enough words to express yourself in Espranto? I’ve never heard that.
Also, not doubting that it was about Esperanto just wanted to share: Mandarin does also use ungood: “不好”. 不 is both the the word for “no” and the general negation prefix, and 好 is “good”. We also have plusungood, 很不好, where 很 means “very” (and in colloqual speech, you can tack an extra 很 on there, 很很不好 is basically doubleplusungood). But, this is really common for a lot of languages, so I don’t see the problem. It also absolutely does not limit your expression, like how they were going on about getting rid of synonyms. “差” is also a word for bad, and there are a number of other prefixes that add additional or different gravitas to words like good or bad. Chinese is considered one of the best languages for poetry so it definitely doesn’t limit expression.
And don’t get me started on that newspeak bullshit. Seriously, when the fuck had any communist ever proposed reducing the expressional function of a language? What the actual fuck was he going on about? Yet another shameless strawman.
Was he thinking of simplified Chinese maybe? That’s the opposite of newspeak! It was intended specifically to reduce the difficulty in learning one of the most difficult to learn scripts in the world and increase literacy rates, and critically, increase access to the language and therefore access to information written in said language! It absolutely did not delete words or mess with the grammar system, or how the language is spoken. Simplified Chinese only affects how characters are written (and isn’t the first overhaul of the Chinese writing system BTW), and simplified and traditional Chinese characters have a one to one correspondence, and can be converted between each other with a simple lookup table. It’s logically the same as going from cursive to print text in English, not English to Newspeak.
Again, I’ve read Pokémon fanfiction with more basis in reality.
I think George either misunderstood the simplification of the Chinese language, purposefully made it it look like it was the removal of Chinese words or like any modern western journalist, making stuff up to make communism in general look like it’s evil
I mean, I doubt he knew anyone who speaks Chinese or was arsed to do any research. “Simplified Chinese” does sound on the surface level like they just dumbed down the language, so I’m assuming he just ran with that assumption because it’s convenient for his narrative. A more accurate and less ambiguous term would be Simplified Chinese Script.
By the way, Korea went through the same thing. Korean used to be written out using Chinese script. But the language structure of Korean wasn’t served very well by Chinese characters, because Korean is an agglutinative language while Chinese is an analytical language. So they made their own script that’s specifically designed for the language.
Fun fact: It was about Esperanto. You can see by his “ungood”, similar to “malbona” for bad.
I mean, is there an actual problem with not having enough words to express yourself in Espranto? I’ve never heard that.
Also, not doubting that it was about Esperanto just wanted to share: Mandarin does also use ungood: “不好”. 不 is both the the word for “no” and the general negation prefix, and 好 is “good”. We also have plusungood, 很不好, where 很 means “very” (and in colloqual speech, you can tack an extra 很 on there, 很很不好 is basically doubleplusungood). But, this is really common for a lot of languages, so I don’t see the problem. It also absolutely does not limit your expression, like how they were going on about getting rid of synonyms. “差” is also a word for bad, and there are a number of other prefixes that add additional or different gravitas to words like good or bad. Chinese is considered one of the best languages for poetry so it definitely doesn’t limit expression.
No, it really doesn’t, but looks like he knew people who did speak Esperanto at the time.