u/_Stormchaser

Near the beginning of the book, there is this passage:

"Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem—delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say."

Now consider O'Brien's work. Most of it deals with tedious people like Syme, who will never consider the deeper implications of what the Party does, but are nevertheless too intelligent to keep around. Doubtless, there are many Symes around that speak a little too plainly and need to be removed.

But Winston? He is the difficult and intricate work that O'Brien is entrusted with. Unlike the others, Winston analyzes the philosophical implications of what the Party is doing: how lies are reshaped into truth, how a an uprising of the proles is required, how thought is being constricted and history erased. Most people don't care about this; Julia only gets slightly philosophical because of Winston, but is only really "a rebel from the waist downwards".

"In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."

In a way, I think this is the reason why she was able to fly under the radar for so long; she simply didn't care about overthrowing the Party until Winston. But Winston stuck out and was identifiable by O'Brien and by Julia, only that O'Brien recognized what he would become first.

It is this philosophical tendency that the Party wants to watch grow and reach its zenith, because there is no better way to test their methods then by brainwashing a philosopher at the prime of their rebellion–no better way to cull a population of its would-be revolutionary thinkers than by predicting, crushing and "debunking" their arguments just as they grow into them.

As we all know, the udātta and svarita in traditional chanting have changed from the original values from high/rising and falling to mid-tone and peaking tone, respectively. While I previöusly thought that these, along with the sannatara, were artificial changes deliberately made, I recently found some papers that changed my mind.

Specifically, I learned about the phenomenon of peak delay that occurs in many tonal and pitch accent languages like Chinese. Jamison argues that this is how the svarita shifted in its value. Moreover, it seems to be quite common for a rising pitch to be preceded by a slight lowering, making the existence of the sannatara–which I previöusly thought was one of Pāṇini's inventions since he is the sole source of it–more plausible.

https://gbegus.github.io/assets/pdf/begus_the_phonetics_of_independent_svarita_in_vedic.pdf

https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS1999/papers/p14_1881.pdf

किं लीढिमद्भवति?

>!लीढि मद्गोलौ!<

What was the mystery element?

For a very long time, I have believed, like most others on this subreddit, that stress accent in the Classical language was introduced by Europeän scholars superimposing the Latin rules of accentuätion onto Sanskrit; as Whitney states:

>80. The phenomena of accent are, by the Hindu grammarians of all ages alike, described and treated as depending on a variation of tone or pitch; of any difference of stress involved, they make no account.

>96. Since the accent is marked only in the older literature, and the statements of the grammarians, with the deduced rules of accentuation, are far from being sufficient to settle all cases, the place of the stress of voice for a considerable part of the vocabulary is undetermined. Hence it is a general habit with European scholars to pronounce Sanskrit words according to the rules of the Latin accent.

I, and the many others, therefore, have vehemently battled against the usage of stress accent in Classical Sanskrit, as any system that might have been was completely unattested.

However, I recently came across this request on the Wikipediä talk page for Sanskrit. In it there is quote from Masica, Colin. 1991. The Indo-Aryan Languages:

>'Among the other factors that need to be considered is the new Latin-like stress system referred to earlier. Although it came to characterize Classical Sanskrit, it may be considered a MIA development. Briefly, the new stress fell on the first long syllable, up to the fourth from the end, starting with and going backwards from the penult. In other words, it never fell on the final syllable, whereas the Vedic accent frequently did so.'

I was intrigued, since I had seen Colin's book before and knew it was well researched, cited actual sources, and was more modern than other books that insisted upon this system of accentuätion. I found the full quote to continue as:

>… Already in Pali, this resulted in a weakening and confusion of the vowel in the post-accentual syllable (Vedic candramā́h 'moon' > CI. Skt cándramāh > Pali candima.

For the first time, I had seen actual evidence of the Sanskrit stress accent, so I dug into the sources Colin had listed:

>9. At least one authority, namely Bloch, disputes the existence of a stress system (as distinct from "rhythm") in MIA, or for that matter in NIA. Most, however (e.g., Jacobi, Pischel, Geiger, Grierson, Chatterji, Turner), hold that there was one, although they are split into two camps as to its nature. See below.

>10. By Bloch, on grounds that there was no stress, and by Jacobi followed by Grierson on grounds that the Vedic system nowhere survived, the new system of Classical Sanskrit having prevailed everywhere.

>12. For further discussion see Allen 1973 and 1983.

(Apparently, Mahārāṣṭri might be an exception that continued Vedic accent placement in its own stress system, but this is disputed; see #MIA-LQ-3 on page 186 of Colin's book)

Looking into Allen 1973, I found he said much of the same, but with more examples of reduction and a citation to his book "Accent and Rhythm". In it, on page 157, I found perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence yet:

>That this existed already in Sanskrit is suggested by certain accentuations prescribed in the Phiṭsūtra of Śāntanava, which are at variance with the Vedic, and by such a rule as that (ii.19) 'a heavy syllable of a polysyllabic word (is accented) when followed by one or two light syllables'.

The rule he cites is लघावन्ते द्वयोश्च बह्वषो गुरुः (Commentary- अन्ते लघौ, द्वयोश्च लघ्वोः सतोर्बह्वच्कस्य गुरुरुदात्तः । कल्याणः । कोलाहलः ॥)

Thus, having seen the evidence of stress-induced reductions and from the Phiṭsūtra, I feel that this "up to the fourth from the end" stress-accent system is rather plausible. However, I would encourage others to research this (especially the views of Bloch, as I haven't looked into that yet), and see what they can find.

Links to my sources:

Colin's book: https://archive.org/details/indoaryanlanguag0000masi/page/182/mode/2up

Allen's 1973 paper: https://libsysdigi.library.illinois.edu/OCA/Books2009-09/illinoisclassica/illinoisclassica81983univ/illinoisclassica81983univ.pdf

Allen's book: https://archive.org/details/accentrhythmpros0000alle/page/156/mode/2up