Re: Re : Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Christophe writes:
>>>>>>
Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> > As for concepts like "freedom", I'm not sure that any language
> > could lack it, and if one did, the speakers would certainly have a
> > compound or an expression to render this. Newspeak seems to me an
> > impossibility.
>
> Well, if Newspeakers did have any notion of freedom, they'd be
> immediately arrested for crimethink, so there'd be no compound or
> expression for freedom.  :-)
>
        Then I think they'd run out of Newspeakers very rapidly, except if they
have a cloning device :) . In fact I don't know. Maybe the concept of
freedom is so deeply rooted in my personal culture that maybe I can't
understand that people can lack it. And as for Newspeakers, I think they
could think of freedom by simply negating their own condition (negation
is completely regular in Newspeak if I remember correctly). For me
"negative" concepts  (expressed by negating another concept) can have as
much force as "positive" ones. But it is IMHO.
<<<<<<

Wasn't the point that there was no newspeak word for "opression" to which a
negative "#unopression" could be posited?  The terms for "imprisoned"
specifically related to "placed in a jail cell for a (specific) crime", IIRC,
and that was the closest you could get, but there was not sufficient semantic
crossover to make it meaningful outside that context.  The phrase "big brother
is ungood" was IIRC an oxymoron, thanks to this kind of semantic delineation.

Of course, I haven't read it since that fateful year, anyway, so I'm probably
way off.




Paul





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