The c vocabulary.

The C vocabulary was supplementary

to the others and consisted entirely of scientific and

technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use

today, and were constructed from the same roots, but the usual

care was taken to define them rigidly and strip them of

undesirable meanings. They followed the same grammatical rules

as the words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C

words had any currency either in everyday speech or in

political speech. Any scientific worker or technician could

find all the words he needed in the list devoted to his own

speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the

words occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words were

common to all lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the

function of Science as a habit of mind, or a method of thought,

irrespective of its particular branches. There was, indeed, no

word for 'Science', any meaning that it could possibly bear

being already sufficiently covered by the word Ingsoc.

From the foregoing account it will be seen that in

Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a very

low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible

to utter heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy.

It would have been possible, for example, to say Big Brother

is ungood. But this statement, which to an orthodox ear

merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have been

sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words

were not available. Ideas inimical to Ingsoc could only be

entertained in a vague wordless form, and could only be named

in very broad terms which lumped together and condemned whole

groups of heresies without defining them in doing so. One

could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by

illegitimately translating some of the words back into

Oldspeak. For example, All mans are equal was a possible

Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense in which All

men are redhaired is a possible Oldspeak sentence.

It did not contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a

palpable untruth-i.e. that all men are of equal size, weight,

or strength. The concept of political equality no longer

existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been purged

out of the word equal. In 1984, when Oldspeak was still

the normal means of communication, the danger theoretically

existed that in using Newspeak words one might remember their

original meanings. In practice it was not difficult for any

person well grounded in doublethink to avoid doing this,

but within a couple of generations even the possibility of such

a lapse would have vaished. A person growing up with Newspeak

as his sole language would no more know that equal had

once had the secondary meaning of 'politically equal', or that

free had once meant 'intellectually free', than for

instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware

of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and

rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it

would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were

nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be foreseen

that with the passage of time the distinguishing

characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more

pronounced -- its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings

more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper

uses always diminishing.

When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the

last link with the past would have been severed. History had

already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the

past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long

as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to

read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced

to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It was

impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak

unless it either referred to some technical process or some

very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox

(goodthinkful would be the NewsPeak expression) in

tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before

approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole.

Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to

ideological translation -- that is, alteration in sense as well

as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the

Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men

are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with

certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty,

and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights,

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers

from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of

Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right

of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new

Government. . .

It would have been quite impossible to render this into

Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The

nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the

whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full

translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby

Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute

government.

A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed,

already being transformed in this way. Considerations of

prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain

historical figures, while at the same time bringing their

achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various

writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens,

and some others were therefore in process of translation: when

the task had been completed, their original writings, with all

else that survived of the literature of the past, would be

destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult

business, and it was not expected that they would be finished

before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century.

There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian

literature -- indispensable technical manuals, and the like --

that had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order

to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the

final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as

2050.

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