Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!cbnews!jmk
From: jmk@cbnews.ATT.COM (Joseph M. Knapp)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Global Cultural Prototype
Summary: Esperanto == Newspeak ?
Keywords: Esperanto
Message-ID: <10351@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 18 Oct 89 17:02:56 GMT
References: <1989Oct17.171307.13744@uncecs.edu>
Reply-To: jmk@cbnews.ATT.COM (Joseph M. Knapp,cb,3c319,(614)8603547)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 24

In article <1989Oct17.171307.13744@uncecs.edu> dgary@ecsvax.uncecs.edu.UUCP (D Gary Grady) writes:
>In article <3814@ethz-inf.UUCP> wyle@ethz.UUCP (Mitchell Wyle) writes:
>>An Hungarian who knows a little Esperonto told me that the early East
>>European communists wanted Esperonto to be a universal language, to
>>spread the word, make the world safe for communism, etc.
>
>For starters, it's spelled "Esperanto" and the commie plot charge is
>more than a bit silly.  Stalin persecuted Esperantists and the language
>was for some time outlawed in the USSR.  The Russian Esperanto
>Association was allowed to re-affiliate with the rest of the world only
>this year.

I have a (probably naive) question that I've wondered about for years: is
it possible that George Orwell's inspiration for the language Newspeak
in _1984_ came from Esperanto? The reason I say this is during a linguistic
anthropology course I took once, we studied a few Esperanto words. The 
word for good, we learned, is 'bono' and the word for bad is 'malbono.'
Newspeak had 'good' and 'ungood.' Even worse, the Esperanto word for easy
was identified as 'facila,' while difficult was 'malfacila.' Also, father
was 'patro' and mother was 'patrino.' This seems to be in keeping with
the Newspeak goal of reducing the number of words in a language by using
affixes (and making it less expressive). Is this the way Esperanto is in
general, or were these just simple examples in the textbook (Fundamentals
of Linguistic Analysis by Ronald W. Langacker).