The Use of English Prime (E-Prime)

In 1933, in Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski proposed that we should abolish the "is of identity" from the English language. (The "is of identity" takes the form X is a Y. e.g., "Joe is a Communist," "Mary is a dumb file-clerk," "Muslims are terrorists," "The universe is a giant machine," etc.)

In 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words "is" or "to be" and the Bourland proposal (English without "isness") he called E-Prime, or English-Prime.

Nonetheless, E-Prime seems to solve many problems that otherwise appear intractable, and it also serves as an antibiotic against what Korzybski called "demonological thinking." Much of the weird and superstitious thinking that exists throughout our society occurs when "is" creeps into our concepts. For one thing, a hunter mistook a woman to "be" a squirrel and shot her in accordance with that belief.

If you wish to get the gist of E-Prime: consider the following two columns, the first written in Standard English and the second in English Prime.

Clearly, written in Standard English, "The photon is a wave," and "The photon is a particle" contradict each other, just like the sentences "Robin is a boy" and "Robin is a girl." Nonetheless, all through the nineteenth century physicists found themselves debating about this and, by the early 1920s, it became obvious that the experimental evidence depended on the instruments or the instrumental set-up (design) of the total experiment. One type of experiment always showed light travelling in waves, and another type always showed light travelling as discrete particles.

If we look, again, at the translations into English Prime, we see that no contradiction now exists at all, no "paradox," no "irrationality" in the universe. We also find that we have constrained ourselves to talk about what actually happened in spacetime, whereas in Standard English we allowed ourselves to talk about something that has never been observed in spacetime at all — the "isness" or "whatness" or Aristotelian "essence" of things.

Other examples (Famous quotations put to E-Prime):

To exist or not to exist,
I ask this question.

Roses look red;
Violets look blue.
Honey tastes sweet,
And so do you.

If I've piqued your interest — see here and here for more info on this.

edited 25th Jan '11 5:58:34 PM by QQQQQ

To be blunt, E-Prime, in actual use, would be boring. Plus, it's impossible to just "revise" one of the most widely spoken languages on the planet.

It sounds like E-Prime is a boring form of Purple Prose.

I wrote solely in E' for a few months on here a while back. Nobody ever noticed, so I don't think the evidence actually corroborates the above posts. Or I just write dully anyway.

I stopped because it didn't clear up my thinking as much as RAW advertised, but I did (and do!) like the experience of forcing myself to think about what I write. You really can't write much of anything in this style without thinking about it, at least at first.

edited 25th Jan '11 6:27:34 PM by Tzetze

I tried writing it — it is a bit of a woozy getting around the "to be"-isms, but it certainly is an interesting exercise for me, noticing how you can't really see all six sides of a cube at once. You have to admit your own perception this way.

Plus, it's impossible to just "revise" one of the most widely spoken languages on the planet.

Now time travel back to the 1500s and before, where thous and thees and whatnots are used. Come back here and you'll be sounding like you're quoting out of Shakespeare. It takes some time for language to adapt, to evolve, and time again for people to accept these revisions. (As demonstrated right now.)

edited 25th Jan '11 6:49:01 PM by QQQQQ

It sounds sort of like Armchair Psychology. Just sayin'.

..."To be" verbs are ludicrously important to languages. You can't have a language without to-be verbs.

You can still write and speak fine without them.

edited 25th Jan '11 6:48:07 PM by Tzetze

Admittingly, the examples up at OP might sound forced, but then it's an introduction — like how we begin to learn the grammar early on when you're taking other language courses.

Did you know in the first link I've provided, mostly all of it is written in E' (except for parts overly pointed out)?

edited 25th Jan '11 6:40:34 PM by QQQQQ

I think a lot of the problem lies in the fact that the examples are translated. «To exist or not to exist» sounds like crap to me, compared to the original Shakespeare.

I know. But this is not to mean that you can't write poetic or figurative in E':

Rain touches the raw pavement
with dry tears. No bird call
ripples the silence. The moon
a lost shadow, thin-legged,
dog-hungry. The collapse of will
lifts bent arms, Karyatid, locust
of seventeen years, into the vault
of the ransacking night. Train
of morning miles away, the iron
rails, the abandoned ashes of want.
Before dawn, alone in gray drift,
the hardened earth grinds its first word.

(from here)

Plus — it's hard to write weak-ass passive sentences

edited 25th Jan '11 6:47:12 PM by QQQQQ

Well, by "revise" I mean change overnight. And even if it were gradual, English is too widespread for it to be changed entirely in E Prime. It is an interesting writing idea, though, but not if you want to write anything exciting.

Though I have an idea of what this could be used for...

It is an interesting writing idea, though, but not if you want to write anything exciting.

How does excitement enter into it?

" The first man stabbed the second man with a knife."

Why isn't this sentence already in E-prime? It doesn't have any ises or bees.

Example 10 introduces new subtleties. No explicit "is" appears in the Standard English, so even those trained in E-Prime may see no problem here. However, if the observation refers to a famous (and treacherous) experiment, well-known to psychologists, the Standard English version contains a hilarious fallacy.

RAW refers to the experiment in which two men rush into a psychology class, struggle and shout, and then one makes a stabbing motion and the other falls. The majority of students, whenever that has been tried, report a knife in the hand of the man who made the stabbing (knife-wielding) motion. In fact, the man used no knife. He used a banana.

Look back at the re-translation into E-Prime. It seems likely that persons trained in E-Prime will grow more cautious about their perceptions and not "rush to judgment" in the manner of most of us throughout history. They might even see the banana, instead of hallucinating a knife.

You do realize that most people would say they thought they saw a knife, right?

This is just assuming that People Are Morons. Which most of them, barring enlightened places like this fora, are, but that's another topic.

Actually, people report events quite inaccurately. Note that errors constitute the entire first long section.

God dammit, like I needed more reasons to hate humanity.

Chagen 46 wrote: "You can't have a language without to-be verbs."

Well, the Russians seem to get along fine without them. Several other languages lack them as well. Then you have Sioux, where almost every word functions as a verb. But I digress.

E-prime strikes me as more of a style choice than a language (actually a language subset). I've always disliked passive voice, and using is simply to describe or equate things seems lazy.

I don't think that Russian works very well as an example. It has a copula which doesn't appear explicitly, as if we wrote «The boy is tall.» as «The boy tall.» Though yeah, I've heard that some Chinese languages just use verb forms of what we'd call adjectives.

edited 26th Jan '11 1:16:42 PM by Tzetze

It seems like a manifestation of the post modernist relativist ideology that eschews the notion of absolute truths and moral judgments. In the world of E-prime, Hitler turns into Jessica Rabbit: we can't say that he was evil, but only that he looks that way.

On the other hand, that sort of wording works well for lawyers, politicians, marriage counsellors and such who need to avoid sounding judgmental.

Oh, bringing Hitler to a discussion. Cool! I don't see a problem if we can't express he fitted the attribute of "evil" in past time by (ab)using an idiomatic construct that in intention should be used to express inherent or fundamental of a being or notion, as those things fall under the field of what we call subjective thinking anyway. The point the change in wording attempts to establish is that we, as initiators of communication, become aware of the subjectivity inherent to such expressions, and make a conscious effort to restate them through such a clear idiomatic construct as to remove the vectors of misinterpretation that we are responsible of, thus limiting ourselves to state what we do want to state. Still, I find I could somehow have expressed all of the above in a more succinct, yet less concise form.

It seems like a manifestation of the post modernist relativist ideology that eschews the notion of absolute truths and moral judgments.

RAW called it model agnosticism, yep.

After actually reading the entire thread (thought I'd give it a shot this once), I'd say that the proponents of E-prime want to make us think about what a copula really means. Not linguistically but semantically and even psychologically. When you equate two things in this way, you create a correspondence that may not help you understand either of them, even impede understanding or cause harm in some way. It can oversimplify the relationship so that information (in the signal-to-noise sense) gets lost in transmission from person to person. It may sound wishy-washy to preface everything with "I think" or "I believe," but the real world rarely gives us absolute equivalences.

Or they could be over-analyzing things to a ridiculous degree.

Humans are not that simple.

edited 26th Jan '11 2:45:28 PM by Chagen46