Linguaggio e Informazione nel XX secolo tesina

Anno scolastico 2012/2013

Alberto Zorzi, 5^D

Ricerca interdisciplinare per l’Esame di Stato

Linguaggio e informazione nel XX secolo

Indice

1. Introduzione p. 3

2. Inglese: Newspeak in Orwell’s “1984” p. 4

2.1. Features of Newspeak p. 4

2.2. The models for Orwell’s Newspeak p. 5

2.3. Newspeak elements in Nazi Germany and communist URSS language p. 7

2.4. Conclusions p. 8

3. Storia: L’informazione radiofonica nel regime fascista p. 9

3.1. L’avvento della radio in Italia p. 9

3.2. Il controllo del mezzo p. 10

3.3. Il Radiogiornale p. 10

3.4. Le “Cronache del Regime” p. 11

3.5. L’indottrinamento della gioventù p. 12

3.6. Conclusioni p. 13

4. Filosofia: La teoria del linguaggio di Wittgenstein p. 14

4.1. Il Tractatus: il linguaggio come immagine logica del mondo p. 14

4.2. Il secondo Wittgenstein: il significato come uso p. 15

4.3. Linguaggio e forme di vita p. 16

4.4. Conclusioni p. 16

5. Bibliografia p. 17

1. Introduzione

Il motivo per cui ho voluto trattare il ruolo che l’informazione ha avuto nel XX secolo è il mio interesse personale per i nuovi mezzi di informazione, ed in particolare Twitter, che in questi ultimi anni sta profondamente cambiando le modalità in cui la popolazione fruisce dell’informazione, in un modo che è sempre meno frontale e sempre più contributivo.

Ho voluto quindi analizzare come l’informazione è stata vista, interpretata e utilizzata, nell’ambito della letteratura, della storia e della filosofia in un periodo in cui essa al contrario era per forza di cose unilaterale.

Ho approfondito, in particolare, l’aspetto che riguarda lo stretto rapporto presente tra essa e il linguaggio, evidenziando come un’alterazione voluta e mirata del linguaggio possa essere strumento di distorsione e controllo sull’informazione e sulla popolazione.

2. Inglese

Newspeak in Orwell’s 1984

One of the books in which the theme of language related to the control of information is more important is George Orwell’s “1984”. In this book, where the author imagines a post-WWII regime, the ruling Party has developed a special kind of language used to keep the population submitted, narrowing the range of expression.

2.1. Features of Newspeak

The Newspeak is a language that the Party wants to impose over the whole population in order to keep it under some kind of “mental control”, making them unable to think freely.

The main principles of Newspeak are:

Diminishing of vocabulary

While in any natural language there is a constant influx of new words to fulfill its function, in Newspeak it’s just the opposite: it has to lose words constantly, as the aim of Newspeak is not to enlarge the range of expression, like in any natural language, but to narrow it, so that an individual is not even able to think critical or subversive thoughts; hence each word related to ideas, things or persons not in line with the Party’s official line is banned.

An example of the way in which this reduction of the vocabulary is made, is the one concerning adjectives: synonyms are banned and just one adjective is allowed. All the shades of expressivity are reduced to the addition of some prefix, for example:

Words as empty shells

To understand this principle of Newspeak we can start from the example of the Newspeak word “blackwhite”, which has two meanings:

• When applied to an opponent: “the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts”
• When applied to a Party Member: “loyal willingness to say, believe and know that black is white when Party demands this”

This is a clear example of Newspeak’s ambiguous words. It can be mistaken with polysemy but there is an important difference: in Newspeak the speaker chooses which meaning to attach to the word, ideally in an unconscious way. As a result, words cease to have any meaning whatsoever and become just “empty shells” ready to accommodate whatever meaning they are told to accommodate.

Evidently, a language consisting of such words cannot be clear, but is used to confuse the speech instead, in order to make it adaptable to the Party line.

Overuse of ready-made phrases

Every language has its own ready-made phrases and there is nothing wrong in itself, the problem is if, as it is in Newspeak, they are the large majority of the speech and are chosen by the Party.

The reason why the Party wants the population to use this kind of language is pretty clear and simple: ready-made phrases make you think less, since they offer you a way of expressing your ideas in the way that the Party wants you to express them, and, in the long term, to make you think like they want you to think.

Those phrases are often themselves abbreviated to further narrow and alter their meaning. As a result, a speech based on this kind of phrases is independent of consciousness and not ideologically neutral, as it reflects the thoughts of the ones who “created” them, the Party.

An example of this is that, as Orwell writes on the Appendix, “the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry of Truth”.

Antonymous euphemisms

While euphemisms, words with the aim to avoid directly naming something unpleasant, are present in every natural language and have nothing bad in themselves, Newspeak uses a particular type of euphemisms: the antonymous, a kind of euphemism that means almost the opposite of what it appears to mean.

Newspeak uses antonymous to alter the perception of things by the population: for instance, “Minipax”, the Ministry of Peace, is actually the Ministry of War, and the so-called “Joycamp” are labor camps.

2.2. The models for Orwell’s Newspeak

But what effectively inspired Orwell in the invention of the Newspeak? They’re probably two:

• Houyhnhnms’s language in Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”

The Houyhnhnms are the inhabitants of the last land that Gulliver visits in the 4th and last book of the novel “Gulliver’s Travel” by Jonathan Swift.

They’re horses endowed with reason, that had developed, as Swift writes, a “sophisticated way of communication”.

• Charles Ogden’s Basic English

What is Basic English? It’s a sort of extremely simplified version of English developed in the 1920s by Charles Ogden with two aims:

• To make it an international auxiliary and universal language
• To develop a first stage in learning English by foreigners

Charles Ogden, in fact, when working on a book where he was comparing definitions of every kind of thing, noticed that, whatever you were defining, certain words kept coming into definitions, no matter how diverse the thing you were defining.

This suggested to him that there might be a limited set of words in terms of which all other words might be stated: that’s how Basic English started. He selected 850 words with which a person could make himself understood and speak within everyday topics, and this made Basic English grow very popular in the 1930s and 40s as we can see by the number of manuals published in those years and, more importantly, by the number of books translated into Basic, starting with the Bible.

Comparison between Newspeak, Houyhnhnms’s language and Basic English

Now that we outlined a brief introduction to these two models, we can make a comparison between them and the Newspeak by the point of view of the previously explained Newspeak principles.

Diminishing of vocabulary

Elimination of synonyms

Words as empty shells

Overuse of ready-made phrases

2.3. Newspeak elements in Nazi Germany and communist URSS language

Orwell invented Newspeak in the same way that physicists invented ideal gas: although it doesn’t exist, it is a convenient model to show in full the characteristic of real gases.