|
RRI newsletter subcription
(e-mail address):
|
 |
Archives:
|
|
| THE WOODEN LANGUAGE (30.07.07) |
| (2007-07-30) |
| Last updated: 2007-07-30 16:00 EET |
Communism has produced mutations at the deepest level of human conscience. Not even language was spared the bad consequences of communism. The language of communism, the severest form of linguistic deviation has been called “wooden language”. It was a reality of the communist totalitarianism, which died with it, unlike other residues of the system. In 1946, English novelist and essayist George Orwell wrote a famous article entitled “Politics and the English Language”, in which he showed that language was maimed by thinking and in turn thinking was marred by the growing imprecision of language. Politics was “responsible” for that state of affairs because the political language was used to mislead, deceit and cheat. It was prone to many clichés, euphemisms and avoiding straightforward address. The annex to the novel “1984”, published in 1948 and entitled “The Principles of Newspeak” offers a detailed presentation of the main ideas in the article. In the late 1980’s, French expert on Soviet issues Francoise Thom best systematised communist language in her well known volume “La Langue de Bois”. Thom showed that the communist wooden language maimed speaking and thinking, since it affected different languages like English, French, Russian and Chinese for instance. It was ubiquitous and had two versions - a popular one and another one used by the state apparatus. It somehow represented the communist power expressing its arbitrariness and unlimited power.
What’s most striking about wooden language is its extremely poor conceptual universe. It is marked by pathos and a desperate attempt to avoid the concrete. It is aggressive, judgmental, vacillates between invectives and eulogies, severs words from things. It sounds like peroration. It makes excessive use of compounds, neologisms, long periphrases or bad metaphors that is metaphors which are not based on a real analogy. Orwell used to call them “dying metaphors”. A classical example of dying metaphor collected by Thom from the Soviet press is “The fascist octopus has sung its swan song”. To analyse wooden language we have invited professor Rodica Zafiu from the Faculty of Letters with the Bucharest University, who comments Orwell’s theory on wooden language.
“This is an extreme interpretation of a linguistics hypothesis that links thought to language, pushed up to the conclusion that if you alter the language, you can change people’s way of thinking. Up to a certain point that is true; and that was felt by those who, in an attempt to impose a propaganda language, were trying to change the way in which people refer to the world, to society. The words were marked as being “ours” and “theirs”, positive and negative, words you can or cannot use. Articles carried by some Romanian papers in the 1950’s read that the word ‘soldier- soldat’ had to be avoided as it was derived from a Latin word meaning salary, and that was a Western term which was not bound to be used. “Soldat” had to be replaced with another word, ‘Ostas’ coined in the USSR. There was also another way of making words lose their original meaning: they were used in phrases able to modify their meaning. “
This wooden language was characterised by inflexibility of forms, juxtaposed syntax, lexical poverty and void content. The wooden language was also an instrument of dissimulation, duality and usurpation. Francoise Thom has also identified another function of the wooden language, namely social ascension. The language became “an element to separate the ignorant grass-roots from the upper classes, being a sign of culture and social ascension. Before being imposed through terror, the wooden language got promoted through snobbism.” According to Thom, if somebody didn’t speak the wooden language they were regarded as a rednecks. The process of educating the new soviet citizens, the eradication of illiteracy were achieved by teaching the wooden language. Such citizens could hardly grow mature from a psychological and intellectual point of view, let alone asserting their personality. For this reason Thom makes a distinction between the Russian and the Soviet language. But it is also true that the wooden language was also a way to escape. Here is Rodica Zafiu.
“The wooden language became a pathology of language as it turned self-sufficient and lost contact with reality, being able to say that white was black and black was white and to modify the normal circumstances under which a language was used. Being under strict control, this language even became unable to meet the aims of a language. To the few people who used to read newspapers at that time, this language became some sort of an interference hampering the real discourse. Maybe the wooden language was a test of submission, to see whether someone was toeing the line of the communist party. You spoke that language you were one of them, otherwise you were a threat. Let’s not forget these deviations came not only from inside the language, they were made through political action. The language couldn’t have become self-sufficient had it not been imposed by the Securitate, by the laws punishing an alternative discourse. A democratic language can never take that path, as there will always be diversity, polyphony, and people can challenge the statements of a political language no matter how stupid; but during those times there was no alternative to the wooden language. And that was the gravest thing.”
In pursuing the Romanian case, Rodica Zafiu has made an attempt to observe the evolution of the wooden language.
“As you follow closely the press language of the 1950’s and 1980’, it’s interesting to note that there existed syntagms that have endured, but that there are changes in the overall tone. The extreme violence of the wooden language of the 1950’s is striking, but this was then lost. As the enemy probably vanished after the ‘50s, the wooden language violence appeared occasionally and always in reference to foreign perils. There was no more domestic need of this language. The wooden language increasingly acquired new material, more like in a Mannerist way. Sentences were increasingly longer, compulsory adjectives were ever more frequent and followed any noun referring to the party and Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Then there was the development of a syntagm, which would also grow longer and become tautological. Look for example at how some event denominations changed. What was originally known as the August 23rd 1944 insurrection turned into a social and national, anti-Fascist and anti-Imperialist liberation revolution. People were expected to repeat this endless syntagm time and again, just like they were compelled to call Ceausescu secretary general of the Romanian Communist Party and president of the Socialist Republic of Romania. This language became a burden with its complications and clichés. The term ‘multilateral’ itself had become insufficient and this had given way, at some point, to the mind-boggling expression ‘multilateral from all points of view’. "
Rodica Zafiu also talks about the consequences of the wooden language over the first years of Romanian democracy.
”Orwell’s examples have also found their way in the Romanian political language where democracy was always ‘original’ and freedom emerged in contexts that would reverse its meanings. As free speech became a currency in our country after 1990, people’s thinking was still modelled on clichés and oppositions. The term ‘private’ for example, acquired a negative meaning, referring to ‘something depriving’. People shunned the word ‘capitalist’, and instead used ‘market economy’, because many viewed capitalism as a negative thing.”
Wooden language fortunately saw its demise along with the ideology that had engendered it, Communism. As the thinking of societies that have endured Marxist regime recovers, language also returns to health.
|
|
| |
WMA |
|
64kbps : |
1
2
3
|
|
|
128kbps : |
1
2
3
|
| |
MP3 |
|
|
64kbps : |
1
2
3
|
|
|
128kbps : |
1
2
3
|
| |
AAC+ |
|
|
48kbps : |
1
2
3
|
|
|
64kbps : |
1
2
3
|
 Historical mascot of
RRI |
2025-02-19
Print
Listen again