In 1947 Eric Arthur Blair wrote a novel called "The Last Man in Europe", the title of which was changed to 1984 and the author's name to George Orwell. It became one of the most aclaimed novels of the 20th century.
One of themes of 1984 was that the government was simplifying the English language (both vocabulary and grammar) to remove any words or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom and rebellion. This new language is called Newspeak and is described as being "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year". In an appendix to the novel Orwell included an essay about it, and the basic principles of the language are explained
The objective of this project is develop a text filter that will take in normal text, and convert it into Newspeak. An initial system will simply change the words in the text to their equivalent in Newspeak, e.g.
"bad", "poor", "lame" all become "ungood"
child", "children", "boy", "girl" become "young citizens"
"quite", "rather", "kind of", "kinda" become "plus"
Like these programs;
From there the next stage is to investigate the more fundemental translation process, whereby the grammar and structure of the text is changed to the style as outlined by Orwell.
No comments:
Post a Comment