Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!xanth!mcnc!ecsvax.uncecs.edu!dgary
From: dgary@uncecs.edu (D Gary Grady)
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Global Cultural Prototype
Summary: agglutination != loss of expressiveness
Keywords: Esperanto
Message-ID: <1989Oct20.015732.2273@uncecs.edu>
Date: 20 Oct 89 01:57:32 GMT
References: <1989Oct17.171307.13744@uncecs.edu> <10351@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: dgary@ecsvax.uncecs.edu.UUCP (D Gary Grady)
Organization: Datalytics, Inc.
Lines: 42

In article <10351@cbnews.ATT.COM> jmk@cbnews.ATT.COM (Joseph M. Knapp,cb,3c319,(614)8603547) writes:
>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? 

An interesting idea but difficult to check (unless there are hints in
Orwell's notes or correspondence).  Newspeak was, of course, intended
for political purposes, a sort of Loglan (or anti-Loglan) for
propagandists.  Maybe he was thinking of Basic English :-)

To answer your question, yes, Esperanto is highly agglutinative -
forming words by combination of roots - which contributes to its
learnability.  This is a somewhat more complex idea than might first be
thought, however, because the combinations involving affixes tend to be
restricted in meaning beyond what a simple combination of the roots
might suggest.  For instance, "vorto" means word and "aro" is a suffix
meaning collection, but "vortaro" means specifically a dictionary.  (A
collection of words in general is a "vortkolekto" and a vocabulary in
the sense of "I have a large vocabulary" is "vortprovizo.")

>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).

This might be your own linguistic background talking.  English has an
incredible number of distinct roots.  Other languages (ranging from
close relatives such as German all the way to to Chinese) have fewer
roots and use more agglutination, like Esperanto.

As I've noted before, Esperanto-speaking linguists, poets, and the like
are, as far as I know, unanimous in pronouncing the language "expressive"
and it seems that to me as well.  I can't imagine someone declaring
that, say, Icelandic isn't expressive because its word for dictionary is
"ordhabok" (I'm using dh for a non-ASCII character that looks like a
crossed d and is pronounced like a "hard" th), literally "word book."

Gary
-- 
D Gary Grady
(919) 286-4296
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