A few years ago I was on my way to a competition and I slept on youth hostel called “Esperantogården”. I thereby became acquainted with the artificial language called “Esperanto”. It was made by dr L.L Zamenhof in 1887 to simplify communication between countries and therefore diminish the misunderstandings and conflicts in the world. The language was meant to serve as a second language in every country. Since his intention was that it was going to be taught in every nation and learned by generally everyone, he made it as a mixture of many languages. However, the most essential part is that he made it very simple and easy to comprehend. Compared to other existing languages Esperanto had very few exceptions when it came to rules and word order etc. Since I am not the greatest fan of studying language, lo and behold, the language instantly caught my interest. It was very tempting because of the logical construction and almost total absence of exceptions.

Still, my point is that the language “Newspeak” brought this to my mind when reading the appendix to the novel. To some extent the two languages (“Esperanto” and “Newspeak”) resemble each other. First of all they both are artificially made by human, every language spoken by mankind is of course made by human, but what I mean is that they are created during a relatively short period of time and they are built from the foundation. On the contrary, every “regular” language has evolved trough time from the same early sounds that our ancestors long time ago managed to utter. They have all taken different paths to the condition that they are in now. Newspeak and Esperanto however are both results of dramatic changes of current languages. Newspeak is a product of English while Esperanto is a compound of several languages.

Secondly, they both are founded on logic and easily comprehensible rules. For example, in Newspeak there is only one way of turning a noun in to an adverb or adjective, you simply add the suffix –ful to turn it into an adjective and –wise to turn it in to a adverb, thus speed becomes speedful and speedwise. This may sound convenient and may as well be, however the absence of variation should probably make the art of literature and even common oral conversations utterly deficient.

Anders

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