Anyone who’s studied the George Orwell novel 1984 want to explain to me what the fucking point of “newspeak” is and why it’s not a strawman “we’re gonna make the commies seem like supervillains and do random stupid shit for no reason” type trope? Because when has any prominent figure in socialism or communism ever suggested dumbing down language? Give me an example of a commie language reinvention please, 1984 is supposed to be the definitive manual on what happened under communism isn’t it?
Also detecting a hint of racism in that plotpoint because there really are real languages that evolved naturally where the positive and negative expressions are indeed structured as good, not good, very good, very not good, etc. Is it trying to say that people speaking those languages are bad at expressing their thoughts because it’s not how English does it?
Actually, Chinese is kind of like this with its use of pre/suffixes. Chinese is also one of the best languages for poetry and literature. Source: Native Mandarin speaker.
Okay so it’s not actually dumbing down or reinvention, but you asked and someone is bound to bring it up, so it’s better to hear from a friendly comrade.
After the socialist revolution in Russia, the new government did in fact have a language reform. Alphabet was streamlined and standardized, famously removing excessive letters (that made learning the language a pain), etc. They also had a bit of a thing for acronyms, which apparently caused quite a lot of butthurt among “lovers of traditional culture”, such as Solzhenitsyn.
Otherwise I agree with comrade Beat, it’s largely a projection of processes that’s been going on in capitalism
Sounds similar to simplified Chinese. Which was intended to, get this Orwell, increase literacy in a country where the vast majority of the population at the time was totally illiterate, and to, shocker of shockers, increase access to information by the common citizen. The exact opposite of Newspeak.
And of course the Chinese supremacists (yes those exist, I’ve interacted with them as a Chinese person myself) hate Simplified Chinese because it’s “destroying culture”, it’s not, and I shit you not this is a real argument I’ve heard at least once: “The Chinese script we know now was historically for the royalty and nobility. The commoners had their own scripts similar to how hieroglyphics was only for the Pharoh in Ancient Egypt. It’s disrespectful to the history and culture of China to mess with this.” Might be why HK and Taiwan didn’t adopt it?
Sounds eerily similar to the Russian empire simps. But I suppose such things are to be expected.
Also you’re on point about increasing literacy, since prior to the socialist revolution, Russian empire didn’t exactly have high literacy rate. Or electricity for that matter - that was also dem ebil commies, destroying muh traditional culture