Comments on "Language as the “Ultimate Weapon” in Nineteen Eighty-Four"

Verbal language can be a very important part of people’s lives, I could imagine life without it, it is the people’s way to express what they think and to interchange thoughts and emotions.

Without language, society would definitely be very different to what we are used to. On the other hand, it can be used as a weapon, when trying to control huge volumes of people, by not allowing them to communicate in a proper way and not been able to express their feelings and opinions. This is the case in the novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, in which language is reduced to a minimum level of complexity in order for the government to have control over people and not allowing them to express their political opinions, and therefore preventing the people from rising up and ask for change. This is expresses in a similar and more profound way in the article “Language as the Ultimate weapon”.

If people aren't allowed to communicated their thought it can become very easy to establish a strict regime, in which whoever is in control of the language, can be in control of the whole population, such is the case of the book, in which an imaginary country lives in an authoritarian regime in which people are controlled and condemned if they thing in a more freely way.

Language is a tool that allows humans to think and act freely, as stated in the article by Jem BErkes, it is key for social evolution and social improvement, without it a path to progress is very far away.

Language is the basis of our society, without communication, societies could not work together to better themselves, therefore it can be a great weapon if someone has control over it.

Talking in the sense of how this can be relevant to a computer science student. It is key to understand and know, that computer languages are very different to our spoken language, and therefore it is a whole new world of abstract and complex instructions. We must be able to understand that there are several ways of communicating things, and a computer language can be an example of an alternative of communication.

It is very important to try and think like the language in order to properly understand it. By doing this we can involve ourselves deeper into it and to greater things.