Newspeak help

[Karlt]

Hi everyone,
in a couple of weeks i have an english presentation i need to do which goes for 10 minutes and focuses on 'The role of Newspeak in 1984 and what is Orwell warning us about?' I need to focus on a few main points and i'm rather stuck for ideas for these points. I have the obvious one being 'why was it invented' but other than that, not a lot of ideas.
Anyone with any ideas for me would be greatly appreciated.

Karl

[The Atheist]

Hi there! I'll play.

Orwell is the type of person who would have excelled at whatever field he wanted - he had the kind of determination, intellect and attention to detail which shames almost everyone else.

Despite his bizarre life, Orwell had really become a philosopher rather than an author and he was trying to tell us about humanity as whole. One idea he had, not backed up by any scientific study whatsoever, was that language shapes us. This Newspeak was born. Given that we now know that children's memories only extend as far back as the vocabulary able to express those memories, he was at least partly right.

Newspeak introduces the precept that by limiting the language to a form where expression of human emotion is impossible, those human emotions themselves would not arise. His classic example is the "dog is free of fleas", but "I am a free man" makes no sense at all. Being somewhat of a polyglot with a smattering of different languages, he was no doubt driven by the fact that one language is not necessarily translatable correctly into another - we all have different ways of expressing some things which are peculiar to us and those who speak our own language. Part of our cultural identity, if you like.

In Oceania, the only culture permissable is the Party's one. Accordingly, Newspeak rids the langauge and thought processes of all those things which make up the former identity of the countries which make up Oceania. Doublethink takes care of the other inconsistencies, which is why Orwell needed to invent it; because we are far more than our language. The combination of doublethink and Newspeak makes dissent impossible. Doublethink ensures that conflicting opinions/emotions are dealt with, but Newspeak makes communication of conflict impossible. Augustinus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Augustine_of_Hippo) and Descartes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes) would get as far as, "I think, therefore I am", but wouldn't have been able to infect anyone else, because nobody would have understood what that means.

That's the why & where, now I'll toss in a few ideas for you to maybe explore & throw in to get the money's worth!

Duckspeak. Really important. The idea is to minimise verbal communication. Get humans to communicate in verbal binary. Not allowing constructions of beauty, no metaphor, no meter, no inflection. No poetry or songs beyond nursery rhyme/doggerel.

Comparatives. plus-[un], doubleplus- [un] Reducing the language - the number of words and constructions this removes would be in the tens of thousands.

Opposite meaning, same word. I used one above! Duckspeak. Good/bad. Forcing the use of doublethink, training the mind through the language.

Abbreviations. Exactly the same as Duckspeak - designed to reduce the language to a staccato series of letters.

The removal of words. As Syme so neatly describes - any word which is deemed to be of no use is simply destroyed. A Newspeak dictionary would be a pocketbook, yet still contain the entire lexicon.