Language and Thought

1. Why is the ruthless totalitarian regime, described in Orwell’s novel, purging Oldspeak and imposing Newspeak?

-They are imposing Newspeak in order to eliminate words that are looked at as unnecessary or useless. They believe that there are extra words in Oldspeak that could be replaced by simply changing one word so that with these changes, could have the different meanings of words. For example, instead of “good” and “bad” it will just be “ungood.” By removing Oldspeak, many words will be removed as well, in order to establish a simpler and more direct use of language.

2.What assumptions are being made about the relationship between language and thought in passage?

-It refers to something such as not thinking, saying that the relationship will obtain such a trait, it is suggesting that by imposing Newspeak and eliminating many of the words that exist in Oldspeak, language will become so limited to certain words that there will not be options in way in which one can express themselves. In other words, people will have only one choice of expression because only one word will exist, due to all “unnecessary” ones being taken out.