The "language can control thought" idea is called linguistic determinism, and has been considered bogus by linguists for a while now, at least the strong form of it.
I agree that "language can control thought" in the sense of parent post and in the sense of the idea of Newspeak wouldn't work. In a free society, the language should naturally evolve to be able to express every important social concept, similar to how creoles form.
On the other hand, that is not to say that an authority can't use language (in the sense of diction) and linguistic censorship as a powerful vehicle to shape thought. Many examples of this exist. Here are some real-world examples
* Modern Hebrew to foster an Israeli identity.
* Sanskritization of Hindustani into an Hindu-Urdu distinction of identity.
* Heavy and active Internet censorship of diction in China to reinforce what topics are taboo for social discussion or treasonous, and remind that Big Brother is watching.
This study found that a child's language production abilities predicts performance on a reorientation task: simply - young humans tend to perform like rats until they learn to use prepositional phrases.
I was under the impression that Linguistic Relativity (or Sapir-Whorf) as in "the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition." was well recognized. I would think programmers would be particularly fond of this idea, because I for one tend to go about problems differently when I write in different languages (also a technique I use when I'm stuck on a problem).
It seems self-evident to me that if you present humans with a set of novel stimuli, giving them a 'vocabulary' for the configuration of the stimuli would help them remember the configuration more durably.
Ex. sets of 3 blocks of various colors are presented to subjects. Either the experimenter gives a 'control lecture' showing possible upcoming sets and they just list the colors, or they teach the subject a name for each of the possible sets - gibberish like 'flurback' and 'orshwalg'. Present a list of sets, spending the same amount of time 'discussing' each set with each set - either with or without using names.
I would predict the 'names' group would significantly outperform in long-term memory formation of which sets were shown in which order.
Another good example I heard is with colors. Different languages have different words for colors, blue being a specifically unmentioned one in Greek. So if you're calling the sea "wine-red" and the sky white, it just makes sense that you would compare other similar colors with the limited set of categories you have. I mean it seems easy to simulate. You set up a classifier to classify colors but leave out blue. Sure, it is going to poorly predict blues and misclassify them as things like reds, whites, or greens, but isn't that what SW predicts?
I believe that applies to languages in their entirety (eg having no words for numbers). I believe this maybe an important difference.
Changing the emotional context of a small number of words; moving a concept from a socially unacceptable word into a socially acceptable one, seems fairly different. So I think we're talking about two different things here.
So while Orwell's "new speak" seems clearly to embody linguistic determinism, using "collateral damage" for "civilian deaths" inside a larger language may not be.
