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.Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammaticalconstructions more and more in their everyday speech.The version in use in 1984, and embodied in theNinth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained manysuperfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later.It is with the final,perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are concerned here.The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view andmental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.It wasintended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a hereticalthought that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc should be literally unthinkable, at leastso far as thought is dependent on words.Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often verysubtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding allother meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.This was done partly by theinvention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words asremained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.To give asingle example: The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as This dog is free from lice or This field is free from weeds.It could not be used in its old sense of politically free or intellectually free since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even asconcepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.Quite apart from the suppression of definitely hereticalwords, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed withwas allowed to survive.Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and thispurpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences,even when not containing newly-created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of ourown day.Newspeak words were divided into three distinct classes, known as the A vocabulary, the Bvocabulary (also called compound words), and the C vocabulary.It will be simpler to discuss each classseparately, but the grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with in the section devoted to the Avocabulary, since the same rules held good for all three categories.The A vocabulary.The A vocabulary consisted of the words needed for the business of everyday life for such things aseating, drinking, working, putting on one s clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening,cooking, and the like.It was composed almost entirely of words that we already possess; words like hit, run,dog, tree, sugar, house, field -- but in comparison with the present-day English vocabulary their number wasextremely small, while their meanings were far more rigidly defined.All ambiguities and shades ofmeaning had been purged out of them.So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class wassimply a staccato sound expressing one clearly understood concept.It would have been quite impossible touse the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political or philosophical discussion.It was intended onlyto express simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities.The first of these was an almost completeinterchangeability between different parts of speech.Any word in the language (in principle this appliedeven to very abstract words such as if or when) could be used either as verb, noun, adjective, or adverb.Between the verb and the noun form, when they were of the same root, there was never any variation, thisrule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms. The word thought, for example, did not exist in Newspeak.Its place was taken by think, which did dutyfor both noun and verb.No etymological principle was followed here: in some cases it was the originalnoun that was chosen for retention, in other cases the verb.Even where a noun and verb of kindred meaningwere not etymologically connected, one or other of them was frequently suppressed.There was, forexample, no such word as cut, its meaning being sufficiently covered by the noun-verb knife.Adjectiveswere formed by adding the suffix -ful to the noun-verb, and adverbs by adding -wise.Thus for example,speedful meant rapid and speedwise meant quickly.Certain of our present-day adjectives, such as good,strong, big, black, soft, were retained, but their total number was very small.There was little need for them,since almost any adjectival meaning could be arrived at by adding -ful to a noun-verb
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