Language

Having started the semester by reading Lucrece, moving on to Shakespeare's sonnets, and having recently read A Midsummer Night's Dream, I have been able to gain an understanding for how well learned Shakespeare was in the english language. His ability to write thousand line poems boggles my mind and I have recently been assigned 1984 by George Orwell for my Language for Teachers course. Some lines that drew my attention to how lucky we are to live in a country where people are allotted the freedom to create words and study language, like Shakespeare and are able to manipulate the language and turn it into a truly beautiful language indeed. Whereas citizens of North Korea are shown what they should believe/practice. I recently read an article about the revolutions in Egypt that said the truth cannot be withheld from citizens now that we have the internet and I find that hard to believe when we continue to have millions suppressed.

                                                             Orwell

The lines that interested me are from p50-51 in 1984
"'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition...' 'We're getting the language into its final shape-the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else...' 'You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words- scores of them, hundreds of them, every day.'

"'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives...'A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well"

What would have happened to Shakespeare had he lived in a similar world? His words would have just been continuous rhymes of 'good to wood' capturing no ones attention and we would not be able to sit, read his writing, and think of all the possibilities each line gives emergence to.

Whereas if we had not had the Greek influence on our language what would have become of Shakespeare? Or if he was a Spaniard would his poetic abilities been lost because of the Spanish language? This is one reason I picked Shakespeare and Ovid to research for my final paper in-class because I hope to learn of Ovid's influences on Shakespeare's writing. It must lay much deeper than just the basis of stories and adoptions like Lucrece. The language Ovid use's in his Metamorphoses is just as remarkable as Shakespeare; if not more so because he uses original material whereas Shakespeare was able to draw from Ovid (amongst others) for ideas of inspiration. The ideas that create inspiration are what are lost in 1984 because the revolution has destroyed books and the amount of words to describe a personal experience were being taken away from Big Brother. Language and words are one of the most powerful objects a person has, which Shakespeare emphasized in MSND by putting the story of Pyramus and Thisby at the end showing he could have had the four lovers die at the end of the play instead of having a "happily ever after" that has become so popular in American culture. The tragedies are what make love stories so special because we are taught how horrible times can be; but on the other hand how surreal they can be as well.