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Re: communicating



But what does this have to do with the point of Joe's statement about
communication? It certainly appears that we both had essentially the same
understanding of Joe's comment. What about his point about communication?

It is a separate point. I'm illustrating the manner in which
Newspeak inhibits communication. It takes longer to construct than
standard English (perhaps that is not so for native Newspeakers)
and it must be translated into standard English before it can be
interpreted. Error is possible in both processes. It is clear that
translation into Newspeak produced more than one error in the case
I cited, and I have seen many worse examples in this group. Since
the topic is communication it seemed a good opportunity for me to
bang this particular drum. I hope I've 'roused some like-minded
souls who have been too timid to admit that Newspeak is, at the
very least, ugly.

Since I am not a particularly good writer of the language I am
sympathetic to breaches in the rules - so long as there is a clear
intent on the part of the communicator to speak the same language.
Any breach of the rules which is made deliberately and which
obfuscates is gratuitous noise. If communication is the goal then
such games should not be played.

I am one of those unfortunate souls who is almost invincibly
unilingual. I took two years of German in college (and got A's!)
and I'm afraid to try to speak the language because my knowledge
of it is so limited (also I seem to mix in some Yiddish). I once
had a fifteen minute conversation in German with a Czech on the
train to Prague. It was the longest conversation I ever had in
German, and it took more than three hours! Even at that duty
cycle (~0.08) I was incredibly handicapped by my small vocabulary.
Knowing which prepositions take the dative is not worth a hell of
a lot when you're trying to ask someone why all those trees have
flags on them. That's all I seem to have retained from my two
years of college German.

Please, treat me as you would any other handicapped person. The
people in France who *could* speak English were very nice to me;
they *did* (well, except most of the Parisians). They were very
tolerant. I am sure they would think that this "reform" of the
English language is a tremendous joke we are playing on ourselves.
Fortunately it can never happen to them.

Leigh