1984 - Planet eBook

interchangeability between different parts of speech. Anyword in the language (in principle this applied even to veryabstract words such as IF or WHEN) could be used eitheras verb, noun, adjective, or adverb. Between the verb andthe noun form, when they were of the same root, there wasnever any variation, this rule of itself involving the destructionof many archaic forms. The word THOUGHT,for example, did not exist in Newspeak. Its place was takenby THINK, which did duty for both noun and verb. Noetymological principle was followed here: in some cases itwas the original noun that was chosen for retention, in othercases the verb. Even where a noun and verb of kindredmeaning were not etymologically connected, one or otherof them was frequently suppressed. There was, for example,no such word as CUT, its meaning being sufficiently coveredby the noun-verb KNIFE. Adjectives were formed byadding the suffix -FUL to the noun-verb, and adverbs byadding -WISE. Thus for example, SPEEDFUL meant ‘rapid’and SPEEDWISE meant ‘quickly’. Certain of our presentdayadjectives, 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 adjectivalmeaning could be arrived at by adding -FUL to a noun-verb.None of the now-existing adverbs was retained, except for avery few already ending in -WISE: the -WISE terminationwas invariable. The word WELL, for example, was replacedby GOODWISE.In addition, any word—this again applied in principleto every word in the language—could be negatived by add-