and shades of meaning had been purged out
of them. So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was
simply a staccato sound expressing one clearly understood concept. It would
have been quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or
for political or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express
simple, purposive thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical
actions.
The grammar of Newspeak had two outstanding peculiarities. The first
of these was an almost complete interchangeability between different parts
of speech. Any word in the language (in principle this applied even to very
abstract words such as if or when) could be used either as verb, noun,
adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and the noun form, when they were of
the same root, there was never any variation, this rule of itself involving
the destruction of many archaic forms. The word thought, for example, did
not exist in Newspeak. Its place was taken by think, which did duty for
both noun and verb. No etymological principle was followed here: in some
cases it was the original noun that was chosen for retention, in other
cases the verb. Even where a noun and verb of kindred meaning were not
etymologically connected, one or other of them was frequently suppressed.
There was, for example, no such word as cut, its meaning being sufficiently
covered by the noun-verb knife. Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix
-ful to the noun-verb, and adverbs by add