In 1998, my father was arrested by Saddam forces
Why? What did he do?
He was arrested for carrying a translated version of George Orwell's 1984.
What's so bad about that?
How can you say something like this? George Orwell is one of the greatest social and political writers in history. Orwell is not a novelist, he never writes for the sake of writing and selling books.
George 101
Orwell believed that if art is made only for the elites, then it is useless. Especially if it doesn't help or speak the common person, after all, what is so great about a talented writer or a great thinker who only talks to his peer? He saw art as a mean to reach the common people in order to be aware of a phenomena or affect change.
In a previous post I mentioned his book "Homage to Catalonia", a book in which he talks about the struggles of the people there. His book animal farm is one of his more famous ones, and it was written in a way for the public to understand.
A Lesson from "1984"
The book simply talks a futuristic oppressive country where the government has installed a "Ministry of Truth". Such ministry had the job of saying that whatever the ruler states to be the truth. For the oppressive government to continue to thrive they started to play with the language. They would redefine terms to mean positive things, removing words that name bad actions from the language. Making the dictionary limited and goes with what the government wants. Here;s a quote from chapter 5
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for commuting thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”
Simply put, by limiting words that could be used to describe a heinous action, governments would be able to restrict ideas used against them. If there are no negative words, you can't describe negative actions.
The Power of Words
When communicating with someone with limited words, you simply wouldn't be able to explain to them a feeling you may have. Imagine reading a post written in English by someone who speaks English horribly, or has limited vocabulary. Without the words and terms, you can't explain anything, without that ability, society wouldn't understand you, if it can't understand you, they won't sympathize with you, and if they don't sympathize with you, then you are just spewing nonsense. Simply put, you would be crazy if you talk and a criminal if react.
Mirand Fricker in her book "Epistemic injustice", she brought up what is called "Hermeneutical injustice" . Hermeneutical injustice suggests that oppressed or wrongly treated people wouldn't have the vocabulary to express what happened to them and what's causing their unrest.
You might be baffled by that, but let me tell you that there was a time where women would go through a certain type of harm for which they had no term to describe it. Something that was happening to them at work, in the street, at school, market places, grocery stores etc... They didn't have a term to describe it, it wasn't rape, it wasn't sexual molestation, or sexual blackmail. We have gone through our lives for centuries before a case in 1975 has coined the term of what we now know as "Sexual harassment".
Before 1975 there was no term for a woman to say when she leaves her job, a term she could use while having a discussion with her friends or coworkers about what she is going through, leading to that feeling of being harmed or oppressed to be an individual feeling buried deep, in spite it being something they all might feel. That doesn't occur under a regime or a government enforcing silence but rather lack of words to express that.
Is the Example and Novel not Enough?
Is there any scientific research to prove this
Let me first explain that there are different languages exist in the world, shocking right? Only first time exclusives on my blog!! But those different languages have different features one you are using to read this post: English, or my first language: Arabic. Some languages don't have futuristic language. For example we can say something like "I will read this book" That "Will" part makes the action futuristic.
In Finland for example, you can't say that. Finnish language treats present and future tenses as one. There is no "I will read the book" There is only "I am reading the book", then you get up and go read the book. Study conducted by Yales ,mentioned by Arabic journalist and writer Shadi Abdulhafez, claims that among 76 countries where they conducted their studies, the people in countries where languages don't have future tense were 30% more likely to save money, 24% not to smoke and 29% to play sport more than people that do have future tense.
It is kind of a funny study if you really think about it. You simply can't say that you will stop smoking, you simply say that you stopped smoking or are stopping smoking, and you will just stop smoking.
Such a study have a lot of criticizers as it is influenced by an old theory known as "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis" or Linguistic relativity. The idea of that is language does have barriers or a way to affect our behavior, making your world vision limited and there is a disagreement over that, for example, the aforementioned Finnish verbs do contain certain twists and turns, so a conjugation table is in order. However, this shouldn't completely deny the possibility of an effect a language has over us.
In Summary
There is a possibility that our languages might have been unfair to us, preventing us from exploring new ideas and expressing our complicated feelings. This is a beautiful idea as it simply means that there is more for us, a forest of feelings that a certain person can feel, we could discover and in turn feel them.
That is not something out of mind as history showed us there we many of coined terms. The term "Fuck off" was fairly recent and thanks to it now you can turn to me whenever I tell to you upvote, share, and comment on this article and simply tell me to fuck off.
Sources and the project idea below
A Project Worth Your Support
In case you do check my sources, which I know you definitely don't, you might have noticed that sometimes I use Arabic sources. In my quest to discover things sometimes I hit barrier of over-complicated terms so I resort to Arabic translations of it. However, sometimes I simply can't any Arabic materials regarding syndromes, terms, illnesses, words etc...
It should be noted that only 10% of English Wikipedia is translated to Arabic, There are more books translated between English and Spanish in one year than from English to Arabic in a thousand years.
My Proposal
I want to start to write at least one weekly post in Arabic where I would translate untranslated works, ranging from Blue Car Syndrome, Mouse Utopia, explain terms like "Orwellian" in Arabic, book experts, articles. Also stuff that for which you simply can't find proper interpretations. Homosexuality, transsexualism, feminism etc... Are all terms that are horribly translated, for example "Homosexuality" has three main words in Arabic, one is translated into "Anomaly", another is "Sexual deviancy", and the only one not insulting is simply translated to a meaningless "Same sex"
I know writing in Arabic here won't be getting me any return at all so I ask for your support for me to write one full post in Arabic, shared across all social media platforms, it would benefit the Arab world as it can spread around, also Hive as it would be welcoming the possibility of entirely new demographic and hopefully future community.
I also hope to fully Arabitize the site in order to welcome those in the Arab world who don't speak English as such demographic could expand the reach of Hive.