Orwell and HG Wells were both really taken by Basic English at first, with Wells arguing it could help build a singular world government. Orwell later became cynical about it, focusing on its lack of any words for things like "revolution." It became an inspiration for newspeak in 1984.
(I honestly think this particular concern was a bit of a straw man of Wells' and Ogden's optimistic views, a lingua franca used in a few settings doesn't have to be a straightjacket for all contexts. But it made 1984, so maybe fine in the end.)
“Incidentally, I wonder what the course of history would have been if in May 1940 you had been able to offer the British people only ‘blood, work, eye water and face water,’ which I understand is the best that Basic English can do with five famous words.”
I have the opposite impression. It is now impossible to have any conversation about conlangs or language reforms without most people parroting 1984 memes, this very thread is already an example of that.
Which is very ironic because these people are just blindly parroting what a book says instead of thinking critically about a topic and forming their own opinions.
I mean the conclusion ends up being the same. Linguistics has understood for generations that language is formed by communities and shaped by need.
Something like esperanto or an intentionally simplified english will never succeed as a universal language. People will use the words they find useful and create new words or usages as they find them valuable.
Stuff like the academy francaise are just a fantasy relic from before this was widely understood about language.
The wonderful thing about having a language with a handful of core words and endless composition is that you never lack a word for anything. Make-un-government I'd expect.
> The wonderful thing about having a language with a handful of core words and endless composition is that you never lack a word for anything. Make-un-government I'd expect.
It seems the Thai language is a bit like that. Some examples:
Or German? Generally composite words seem more popular in languages that don't prefer loanwords in general, because there is a limited supply of native words (or morphemes). I think English is in the opposite extreme.
I've been studying the Belter creole from the Expanse[1] and lack of vocabulary[2] is a substantial issue. However, circumlocution can work, and so I'd propose several revolutions, depending upon which side one is on[3]:
(laudative)
térash fo feriting
burn (as in a ship's engines) for freedom
(pejorative)
gang belowt
temporary excursion, involving lots of blood
(cynical)
du ganyamang owta we
change the winners
[1] TV Show. Normally I'd privilege books, but the authors have said theirs was just made up and shouldn't be considered canon, especially as the TV version is based on code-switching a proper creole.
[2] with na- as a productive un-, very much like newspeak.
[3] I believe this is attested: "Detim da belowt im ere da wowl, sasa kemang to xalte wit?" (when blood hits the walls, do you know where you stand?)
That's quite the hobby to pick up - what resources are you using to learn vocabulary / are there some communities for this, or is it all stitched together from the show?
There are resources[1] with communities[2], which are stitched together from the show[3].
I learned about lang belta from HN[4], and am interested because the poverty of attested vocabulary makes circumlocution essential. Beside the challenge, it's a language that has no L1 speakers, so milowda kowmang eka, we're all equally disadvantaged[5]. Beyond that, I guess I'm just a kuxakuwala, someone who's been stanning space ever since discovering SciFi[6].
Fo showxa fit natet, gova gif terash, kori gif ye mash.[7]
[2] which I have yet to explore. Maybe when I get closer to real-time productivity I'll be tempted enough to join discord and potentially even Patreon. (can I just make a payment directly to Nick Farmer? Do you all have IBAN in the US yet, so I can avoid third parties, like Patreon, SWIFT, etc.?)
[3] as explained earlier, the show's creole is a retcon with authorial blessing, as it's been done by a langwala, a linguist, in an effort to produce a productive conlang. The show mainly codeswitches a "beltish" lect, with english as the acrolect but in principle (subject to willingness of audience, writers, and actors to exploit it) there's an underlying lang belta basilect.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezU-F028krU
My understanding of the belter language was it was partly driven by the necessity to communicate in a vacuum so gestures were also important. Does that feature in the linguistics at all, or is it purely supplemental?
Again, I haven't actually read the books or seen the show, so I'm a poor reference, just wa paxoniseki unte wa beltawala, an earthling stanning the language like an otaku.
I like what I've found online of the gestural language, and apparently it gets used far more in the show than lang belta itself (being much easier for anglophone audience and actors).
My impression is that it is normally a supplemental redundant channel (pair go with the outstretched arm, ya with a raised fist, kori or sensa with the hand on heart, tugut with the hand beaks, etc.) but an area I can easily imagine it would play a paralinguistic role is in telegraphing sarcasm: one might say something in english while gesturing the opposite[1][2]. IIRC Naomi does this to Martians at one point?
[1] I'd imagine spacesuit comms would often show talking heads, leaving the belter gestural language —which uses everything but the head, because helmets— with a clear channel for side messages to one's crew, in one's immediate presence, versus the ofisha comms reporting to management.
[2] having noticed the strong resemblance of "Oi, mush!" to "Ой, мужик!" I now wonder how coincidental the resemblance of "Guv'nor" to "говно" may be?
On a tangent: Quintilian has an interesting chapter on the use of gesture in rhetoric, and he denounces imitative gesture (and especially imitative voice) as being infra dig, while lauding more abstract gesture as a side channel to breadcrumb the separate parts of a speech and their various relations to the current line of argument.
> "It was for this reason that Demosthenes used to practise his delivery in front of a large mirror..." et seq
(On the importance of glances, when not hidden by a spacesuit helmet: the soviet equivalent of Sesame Street used puppets with mobile eyes, which I find very expressive indeed.)
Conway's Law probably applies. The linguist and the choreographer for the TV show are two separate people, so there probably won't be very much integration between language and gesture.
Basic English is a very good tool for teaching English as a second language, but I think that wasn't the focus of both of them; Also Ogden was kind of interested to create a common language for science that lacks ambiguity; I don't think he thought much about politics.
(I honestly think this particular concern was a bit of a straw man of Wells' and Ogden's optimistic views, a lingua franca used in a few settings doesn't have to be a straightjacket for all contexts. But it made 1984, so maybe fine in the end.)