At first glance, Orwell’s Newspeak in 1984 and Esperanto seem to have little in common. One is the fictional language of a totalitarian regime; the other was created by L. L. Zamenhof as an international language designed to make communication easier between people from different countries.
Yet they share an interesting structural principle: the simplification of language through regularity and word formation.
In Newspeak:
good → ungood → plusgood → doubleplusgood
Instead of good, bad, better, or excellent, one basic word does much of the work through prefixes and modifiers.
A surprisingly similar pattern exists in Esperanto:
bona → malbona → pli bona → bonega
good → bad → better → excellent.
The resemblance is structural, but the intentions are radically different. Esperanto uses regularity to make a language easier to learn and to generate words without memorizing endless irregular forms. Zamenhof’s aim was not to restrict thought, but to facilitate international communication.
Newspeak, by contrast, is designed to reduce the space in which thought can operate. Its ultimate purpose is not merely to simplify communication, but to make certain ideas increasingly difficult—or eventually impossible—to formulate.
There is, however, an intriguing historical footnote.
For decades, it has been speculated that Orwell’s antagonism toward his aunt’s husband, Eugène Lanti, a French socialist and prominent Esperanto speaker, may have influenced his conception of Newspeak. The claim remains speculative, not an established fact. But the story is fascinating in its own right because it leads back to the 1920s and 1930s, when many people on the political left regarded Esperanto as more than a neutral language: they saw it as a vehicle for international solidarity, social change, and working-class emancipation.
That makes the apparent linguistic connection even more intriguing—but it is important not to confuse historical speculation with evidence.
The deeper issue lies elsewhere.
A language does not merely describe thought. It also provides many of the distinctions through which we organize it.
Words do not correspond one-to-one with things or ideas. They exist within a network of synonyms, antonyms, associations, contrasts, and cultural practices. Meaning is therefore, in an important sense, holistic: a word cannot be fully understood in isolation from the larger linguistic system in which it lives.
If excellent, remarkable, magnificent, admirable, and exceptional are all reduced to variations of good, we have not merely simplified the dictionary. We have reduced the palette of distinctions available to us.
Of course, structural simplicity does not automatically produce impoverished thinking. Esperanto is a good example: a language can be highly regular and economical while remaining capable of expressing complex ideas. The danger begins when simplification stops removing unnecessary complexity and starts removing meaningful distinctions.
And that is perhaps the point worth remembering:
Distinctions matter.
So don’t be afraid of linguistic complexity. When you write, use a good thesaurus. Look at the synonyms and antonyms. Explore the neighboring words and the subtle differences between them. Then choose the word that says exactly what you mean.
Because language is not beautiful despite its complexity.
Language is beautiful because of it.
