Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Discourse of Argumentation in Totalitarian Language and Post-Soviet Communication Failures
- 2 Russian and Newspeak: Between Myth and Reality
- 3 ‘A Society that Speaks Concordantly’, or Mechanisms of Communication of Government and Society in Old and New Russia
- 4 Legal Literature ‘for the People’ and the Use of Language (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century)
- 5 ‘How to Write to the Newspaper’: Language and Power at the Birth of Soviet Public Language
- 6 Between the Street and the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of the Social(ist) Meeting in Literature and Cinema
- 7 Was Official Discourse Hegemonic?
- 8 Attempts to Overcome ‘Public Aphasia’: A Study of Public Discussions in Russia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century
- 9 Allotment Associations in Search of a New Meaning
- 10 ‘Distances of Vast Dimensions …’: Official versus Public Language (Material from Meetings of the Organising Committees of Mass Events, January–February 2012)
- 11 Insides Made Public: Talking Publicly about the Personal in Post-Soviet Media Culture (The Case of The Fashion Verdict)
- 12 Distorted Speech and Aphasia in Satirical Counterdiscourse: Oleg Kozyrev's ‘Rulitiki’ Internet Videos
- 13 The Past and Future of Russian Public Language
- Notes on Contributors
- Subject Index
- Name Index
2 - Russian and Newspeak: Between Myth and Reality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Discourse of Argumentation in Totalitarian Language and Post-Soviet Communication Failures
- 2 Russian and Newspeak: Between Myth and Reality
- 3 ‘A Society that Speaks Concordantly’, or Mechanisms of Communication of Government and Society in Old and New Russia
- 4 Legal Literature ‘for the People’ and the Use of Language (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century)
- 5 ‘How to Write to the Newspaper’: Language and Power at the Birth of Soviet Public Language
- 6 Between the Street and the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of the Social(ist) Meeting in Literature and Cinema
- 7 Was Official Discourse Hegemonic?
- 8 Attempts to Overcome ‘Public Aphasia’: A Study of Public Discussions in Russia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century
- 9 Allotment Associations in Search of a New Meaning
- 10 ‘Distances of Vast Dimensions …’: Official versus Public Language (Material from Meetings of the Organising Committees of Mass Events, January–February 2012)
- 11 Insides Made Public: Talking Publicly about the Personal in Post-Soviet Media Culture (The Case of The Fashion Verdict)
- 12 Distorted Speech and Aphasia in Satirical Counterdiscourse: Oleg Kozyrev's ‘Rulitiki’ Internet Videos
- 13 The Past and Future of Russian Public Language
- Notes on Contributors
- Subject Index
- Name Index
Summary
This chapter will examine the concept of Newspeak, invented by George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, and its relationship with the actual processes taking place in the Russian language, and also the word novoiaz, the Russian translation of Newspeak. (It is the Russian word that will be considered, not Orwell's neologism.)
THE LEXICOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF NOVOIAZ
The word began to appear in Russian dictionaries only recently, at the end of the twentieth century: it is not to be found in any of the defining dictionaries on the slovari.ru website, nor in such dictionaries as A. P. Evgen'eva's Slovar’ russkogo iazyka (MAS), the Tolkovyi slovar’ by S. I. Ozhegov and N. Iu. Shvedova (SOSH) or the Semanticheskii slovar’ edited by N. Ju. Shvedova (SemS).
The noun novoiaz is found in the Bo'shoi tolkovyi slovar’ russkogo iazyka (BTS) edited by S. A. Kuznetsov, published in 1998. It is marked as ‘pejorative’, and defined as
referring to the language of the Soviet period, distinguished by its ideological nature, heaviness and cumbersome bureaucratic phrases. → The word originated in the Russian translation (by V. Golyshev) of George Orwell's 1984.
In the Tolkovyi slovar’ iazyka Sovdepii (TSJaS), the first edition of which also appeared in 1998, the word novoiaz has two definitions, which may evidently be taken together as a sort of curious lapse resulting from ignorance of the origin of the word and of its true meaning:
A philological and ideological current of the 1920s, the representatives of which aimed to create a ‘new’ language suitable for the revolutionary conditions of the period. Hence novoiaz, abbreviation for novyi iazyk [new language].
Of excessively simplified and at the same time incomprehensible language or means of communication.
Alongside these we should also mention Wiktionary, which exists only on the Internet (http://ru.wiktionary.org). It is of importance that this dictionary is based on data from the Russian National Corpus (RNC, www.ruscorpora.ru), which I too shall use in the present study. Wiktionary also gives two definitions, provided with supplementary notes.
neol. An invented language in George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984; language distorted by party ideology and party-bureaucratic lexical usages, in which words lose their original meanings and mean something opposite.
neol., pej. Of any new tendencies or new words in the language.
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- Information
- Public Debate in RussiaMatters of (Dis)order, pp. 31 - 51Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016