“For instead of the calendrical terms Monday, Tuesday and so forth, we cheerfully offer the following surrogates. Use them freely and often, for their use honors us all.
For Sunday, please use Sunshine
For Monday, please use Monty
For Tuesday, please use Toes
For Wednesday, please use Wetty
For Thursday, please use Thurby
For Friday, please use Fribs
For Saturday, please use Satto-gatto” (Dunn, M).
In the context of a book, this quote’s an example of the appliance to silly despotic rules, which not allows using particular letters on the island of Nollop. Days of a week now sound funny and invalid, unacceptable and childish, so when you pronounce them you can’t help thinking you’re becoming stupid. Parallel with Orwell’s newspeak is obvious: a very strong metaphor to show, how citizens of the totalitarian country are not allowed to express themselves in a way they used to express; government literally shuts their mouths. So I’ve started to think in a literal way about modern people not speaking their normal native language.
Again, Orwell and Dunn speak about the cruelty of a government in the totalitarian country, so ban here comes from up-high authority. But nowadays we see a tendency of shorting words inside one language and high level of linguistic borrowing one culture from another not only because of one culture influences and subdues another but also because in one culture there’s a more handy word to name a particular thing. Then borrowing’s reasonable and comes from people (usually from the Internet), and globalization helps in making borrowed word popular.
If language change comes from people, not from rulers, we don’t think it’s a sign of enslaving. People seem to have a silent agreement to make native languages more common, more like each other to simplify the process of communication and understanding. How it can be a bad thing? Also, everything now is on a way of simplifying, and such changes come from all people’s silent agreement. We’re not forced to it, we will it.
So can tendency be considered positive or negative depending on where it comes from if it’s still the same tendency? If changes come from us we think that’s normal; the same change comes from government and we think it’s silly and brutal. But in fact, there’s just a tendency of simplifying things. And language, of course, is an important thing, but still just a part of a general process.
