Comments on: Political power and language change http://www.soupface.net/blog/2008/07/21/political-power-and-language-change/ Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:05:22 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.2 By: Lucas http://www.soupface.net/blog/2008/07/21/political-power-and-language-change/#comment-4735 Lucas Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:37:48 +0000 http://www.soupface.net/blog/?p=71#comment-4735 Good points, Chris. Tulin and Matt (the people I was discussing this with) also mentioned the change to modern Turkish as a potential counterexample. Good points, Chris. Tulin and Matt (the people I was discussing this with) also mentioned the change to modern Turkish as a potential counterexample.

]]> By: Chris http://www.soupface.net/blog/2008/07/21/political-power-and-language-change/#comment-4734 Chris Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:04:07 +0000 http://www.soupface.net/blog/?p=71#comment-4734 As a caveat to the comparisons of Orwell's Newspeak to the historical attempts at forcing a nation or group of people into speaking a particular language, it's worth keeping in mind that in the historical cases you have instances of a political power attempting to completely overhaul a population's means of communicating, while Newspeak is much more insidious because it is a transformation of the language already spoken. The historical cases also deal with conquered peoples, whereas in 1984 it seems plausible if not assumed that the ruling power is homegrown. I feel like a thorough analysis of the control of language in modern China would be much more revealing, had we reliable access to that information. Of course, as a substitute we can always look at our own country or our neighbors to the south. Political Correctness might serve as a reasonable launching point for such a comparison. We will talk about this business of language and power in person at some point. It will be long and dreary for others involved and I'll begin babbling about systems of signification and the African American tradition of Signifyin' in music and the word vs the world and who knows what else and it will briefly make me feel like my degree was about something. As a caveat to the comparisons of Orwell’s Newspeak to the historical attempts at forcing a nation or group of people into speaking a particular language, it’s worth keeping in mind that in the historical cases you have instances of a political power attempting to completely overhaul a population’s means of communicating, while Newspeak is much more insidious because it is a transformation of the language already spoken. The historical cases also deal with conquered peoples, whereas in 1984 it seems plausible if not assumed that the ruling power is homegrown. I feel like a thorough analysis of the control of language in modern China would be much more revealing, had we reliable access to that information. Of course, as a substitute we can always look at our own country or our neighbors to the south. Political Correctness might serve as a reasonable launching point for such a comparison.

We will talk about this business of language and power in person at some point. It will be long and dreary for others involved and I’ll begin babbling about systems of signification and the African American tradition of Signifyin’ in music and the word vs the world and who knows what else and it will briefly make me feel like my degree was about something.

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