LANGUAGE TAG REGISTRATION FORM (Newspeak)
Thor Kottelin
thor.kottelin at elisa.fi
Mon Jun 2 13:45:05 CEST 2003
> At 22:13 +0300 2003-06-01, Thor Kottelin wrote:
>
> >A more likely case of usage would be <span lang="en">uneasy</span> vs. <span
> >lang="x-en-newspeak">uneasy</span>. The latter doesn't mean "anxious" or
> >"nervous", but simply "difficult".
>
> This is a reading rule. There are dozens of ordinary English words
> which can be read in more than one way, or which have completely
> different meanings.
But in this case we're dealing with a defined variant of the English
language, so we have the option of tagging the word for clarity.
> "Normans, you are doubleplus ungood. You have committed many acts of
> thinkcrime and sexcrime. You are obviously unsane, but I will heal you.
> First of all, how did you become a thinkcriminal? There are no oldthinkers,
> where do you get your thinks so speedwise?"
>
> This language is English.
I don't think any of my English teachers would have accepted that passage as
English unless I would somehow - implicitly or explicitly - have "tagged" it
as Newspeak. Also, FWIW, "doubleplus", "ungood", "thinkcrime", "sexcrime",
"unsane", "thinkcriminal", "oldthinkers" and "speedwise" all fail my email
client's spell checking.
Thor
More information about the Ietf-languages
mailing list