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Strelnikov
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Post #59331
Joined: 11 Aug 2009
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Posted: Fri 2009-08-28 13:59
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| Politics: Anarcho-socialist |
Country: Russia |
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| Similarities between Old English and Newspeak PT II |
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Similarities between Old English and Newspeak PT II
In Newspeak, we can create adverbs by adding the '-ful' suffix to the root. This gives us a word such as healthful for healthy and which means full of health. already we use this form with words like helpful or truthful.
Samewise, some Old English dialects had an interesting convention to build nouns from adjectives. For instance the adjective strong. We might say 'John was strong enough to lift the rock' and we might also say this as 'John had enough strength to lift the rock'. In Old English to create the noun strength from strong, we would simply add the '-o' suffix - streng (OE = strong) becomes strengo.
Some quick original examples of this are:
bield (bold) bieldo - boldness
braed (broad) braedo - broadness (breadth)
cield (cold) cieldo - coldness or modernly just 'cold'
fyl or fyll (full) fyllo - fullness
hael (health) haelo - health
haet (hot) haeto - heat
ield/eld (old) ieldo - old age
leng (long) lengo - length
menig (many) menigo - crowd
What is truly interesting with this is that there were other conventions in force in various dialects. We can see that whatever other means were used to create nouns from adjectives, this particular method seems to have pretty much died out and never caught on permanently. In fact we can easily see from this that the technique which caught on was the addition of the -ness suffix. This was also in use at the time, and used to some forms of feminine abstract nouns from adjectives. Although in that case, the '-ness' ending was used far more than has come down to us in modern times.
What becomes accepted and what passes out of use is one of the most interesting topics in language. English has a great historical record which allows us to see what was in use at times and how that evolved or became refined and how some tricks, although popular at the time, may have fallen off completely.
That is the difference between manufactured language and the natural evolution of language. In some cases what is useful in other nearby languages is borrowed and preferred. Or two close language such as Old English and Old Germanic evolve in different ways based on the what preferences catch on. After time you can see the parallels between the languages and almost the actual points where they diverged. Fascinating.
For Newspeak I prefer the adding of the '-o' both for its brevity (briefo) and its uniqueness (uniquo).
Have fun with that.
-Pasha |
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