English-Prime - English without "is"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

by silentbicycle • 18 years ago

108 76 18 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

One of my school's founders gave an essay-writing workshop when we applied to colleges, and told me about this when critiquing my essay.

IMHO, you should think of it as a good exercise instead of a writing style. You don't need to eliminate all forms of "to be" in your writing. However, thinking about how you would do so forces you to choose your words more carefully. You can add "to be" back in later once you've mastered E-prime.

You may want to try the same thing with adverbs and prepositional phrases. Eliminate them, and see how it affects your writing. Then reintroduce them only if they make your writing more clear.

In programming, you can perform similar exercises with mutation. Eliminate all assignment statements, and see how you structure your code in their absence. Then add them back as necessary.

euccastro4• 18 years ago

I see what you did there. :)

jrockway• 18 years ago

> Eliminate all assignment statements, and see how you structure your code in their absence. Then add them back as necessary.

Actually, I think removing points is the typical exercise. Removing assignment is too easy :)

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Pointfree

nostrademons8• 18 years ago

Everybody has to start somewhere. Not everyone programs in Haskell. ;-)

newt03112• 18 years ago

Agreed. Recursion and first-class functions are something that most CS students know way too little about.

silentbicycle7• 18 years ago

Which, in a roundabout way, ends up looking curiously similar to Forth... :)

andr• 18 years ago

> You can add "to be" back in later once you've mastered E-prime.

Like mastering LISP and going back to Visual Basic.

cabalamat• 18 years ago

You're implying that Lisp is a subset of VB; do you really want to stand by that statement?

jfoutz• 18 years ago

master append before going back to nconc

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

How would you translate "I think, therefore I am"?

"I think, therefore I exist"?

nostrademons8• 18 years ago

Descartes meant the latter, correct?

foulmouthboy• 18 years ago

The former sounds much nicer.

astine2• 18 years ago

Both. In this context, 'to be' is used in the same sense as 'to exist.' I'm not sure how you could use a different sense of 'to be' without rendering the sentence incomprehensible.

euccastro4• 18 years ago

That's how it's usually translated in Spanish.

Cogito, ergo sum. -> Pienso, luego existo.

riahi• 18 years ago

That's interesting, because staying truer to the latin would result in "Pienso, luego soy"

euccastro4• 18 years ago

I find this example harder to swallow:

"The question of whether to exist or not to exist comes to mind."

silentbicycle7• 18 years ago

Perhaps something along the lines of "My consciousness proves my existence" or "My awareness precedes my existence", depending on the interpretation.

randomwalker• 18 years ago

Many languages get along just fine without that verb, such as my native language, Tamil. I learnt a tiny bit of Russian a long time ago, and -- someone correct me if I'm wrong -- I don't think Russian has it either. For instance, "what is your name?" is "kak vas zovut?" Also, Mandarin has shi which can be used in some senses of "to be" llsted in the article but not others; for instance, identity but not predication.

So I dug a little deeper and found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_copula

"A feature common to all Indo-European languages is the presence of a verb corresponding to the English verb to be."

I'm a bit of a language nerd, so this is very interesting.

tokenadult3• 18 years ago

Russian doesn't have an expressed copula verb in the typical present indicative sentence that simply links a subject and a predicate. So the way I used to say "I'm an American" would be expressed in Russian (which also lacks indefinite articles) as if I said, "I American." But Russian does have a verb 'to be' and makes moderately heavy use of it in other tenses and moods.

antiform• 18 years ago

Actually, the Mandarin shi can also used for predication with the "noun shi adjective de" grammar pattern. For instance, you could say "ta shi hen gao de," for "he is very tall." This is grammatically correct, but then the sentence has a tone that is like passive voice in English. Thus, in most simple cases, like the above example, you would opt for the terser "ta hen gao" instead.

tokenadult3• 18 years ago

"For instance, you could say "ta shi hen gao de," for "he is very tall." This is grammatically correct, but then the sentence has a tone that is like passive voice in English."

I would interpret such a Mandarin sentence to come from a discourse context in which the person's height has already become a topic, as for example when the speaker is conceding to another speaker that the person is tall (but perhaps unskilled in basketball, nonetheless).

The normal way of expressing "he is tall," "the language learner is smart," etc., is to use what linguists often call "stative verbs" (English-speaking learners often call them "adjectives") without any use of "是 [be]."

kirubakaran• 18 years ago

> Many languages get along just fine without that verb, such as my native language, Tamil.

Ummm... in Tamil, "Movie was good" == "Padam nandraga irundhadhu". Irundhadhu is "was". AFAIK that is how people say it. It would be weird without "was".

jballanc• 18 years ago

While Turkish does have a form of "to be", it's not used the way you would expect. Many sentences that would otherwise use some conjugated form of "to be" in Turkish will simply do without a verb.

For example, introducing yourself you'd say "I'm Joe". In Turkish, this is "Benim Joe", where "Benim" is the first person singular pronoun with the first person possessive suffix. Many other sentences have no verb, which can make learning Turkish difficult.

eru5• 18 years ago

I actually found learning Turkish quite pleasing. But perhaps I just love to learn strange (for me) things.

wilkes• 18 years ago

I miss R.A.W.

TFrancis• 18 years ago

Seriously Robert Anton Wilson's books changed the way I look at the world. I started with "Prometheus Rising" and followed that with "Quantum Psychology." Honestly the two best books I've ever read (Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is close).

silentbicycle7• 18 years ago

Same here. I'm not sure how much exposure the community here has to those ideas...

cjc• 18 years ago

Robert Anton Wilson disliked the verb:

I suppose Joyce made Bloom such a tangled genetic and cultural mixture to expose the absurdities of anti-semitism; but I also suspect that he wanted to undermine that neurolinguistic habit which postmodernists call "essentialism" and which Korzybski claimed invades our brains and causes hallucinations or delusions every time we use the word "is."

http://rawilson.com/prethought.shtml

(Scroll down approximately 1/4 of the page for the entry titled "Schrödinger's Jew")

metachor• 18 years ago

Before his death, Robert Anton Wilson taught several online courses at the Maybe Logic Academy (http://www.maybelogic.org), which he founded. A large component of these courses took place in online discussion forums, where RAW encouraged the participants to use e-prime for all discussion.

At least one of the courses also included readings from Alfred Korzybski and the General Semanticists, who played a large role in formulating the concept and practice of e-prime.

Korzybski wrote a fascinating book called Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. In this work, Korzybski postulates that the multi-millennium-old Aristotelian system of thinking contributes a form of "essentialism" to the underlying metaphysical assumptions of the Western linguistic and philosophic traditions ("things" having "is-ness").

Korzybski argues that these metaphysical assumptions appear "false-to-facts" with modern scientific understanding (i.e. an operational accounting inspired by biological and physical systems thinking). These assumptions introduce flawed and delusional reasoning when projected on to a linguistic domain, and their operation on a human social system over time results in the emergence of pathological behaviors in individuals' interactions.

Korzybski and others concluded that a step towards a more-sane system of thinking might result in part from making explicit the flawed metaphysical assumptions implicitly derived from Arestotelianism, and eleminating their behavioral manifestation in speech (i.e. as forms of the verb "to be").

Science and Sanity can be previewed online at Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books?id=KN5gvaDwrGcC&printsec=f...

Incidentally, the same RAW course which took readings from Korzybski also included James Joyce's Ulyesses as a primary text.

daveambrose• 18 years ago

Interesting. What's the difference between this syntax and merely eliminating passive voice?

"E-Prime, short for English-Prime, is a modified English syntax and vocabulary lacking all forms of the verb to be: be, is, am, are, was, were, been and being, and also their contractions. Sentences composed in E-Prime seldom contain the passive voice, which in turn may force the writer or speaker to think differently. By eliminating most uses of the passive voice, E-Prime compels the writer to explicitly acknowledge the agent of a sentence, possibly making the written text easier to read and understand."

nihilocrat2• 18 years ago

"I am Sam" is active voice, and it's using the verb 'to be', because it uses 'am'. Eliminating the 'am' in this case would be pretty difficult, but another poster has reworked a line of Hamlet that uses "I am" and it's a pretty good example of using E-Prime for the sake of improving writing style.

"I was assaulted" is passive voice, also using the verb 'to be'. As you may notice, the passive voice uses 'to be' very often, so eliminating 'to be' would eliminate most cases of passive voice.

Languages like Russian and many others sort of do this: in present active indicative you do not use 'to be' unless you are emphasizing it, so "Sasha is a student" is literally "Sasha student". There is some linguistics term for it but it's escaping me at the moment.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

Hamlet:

I am chiefly concerned with the question of killing myself or not killing myself.

EDIT. Oops, 2nd try:

A concern has arisen in my consciousness regarding the question of killing myself or not killing myself.

...I'm trying to keep all the same implications that WS put into the phrase, to hell with scansion.

nostrademons8• 18 years ago

Nuh uh, you used "I am."

Try:

"I might or might not want to kill myself." (The indecisive emo teenager version.)

"Death and existence vex me." (The pompous philosopher version.)

"Life sucks / then you die / so fuck the world / and let's get high." (The goth poetry version.)

"OMGWTFBBQLOL." (The hyperactive netspeak version.)

"?" (The concise punctuation version.)

sdurkin• 18 years ago

To exist, or not to exist? That question occupies my thoughts.

whatusername• 18 years ago

Existance, or oblivion? I ponder this.

astine2• 18 years ago

Shakespeare's use of 'esse' in Hamlet is different from it's the use that is criticized by E-Prime I believe. It's worth noting that the Scholastics, influenced by Aristotle, enumerated and distinguished the different meanings of 'esse.' E-Prime seams to be more concerned with identity, Hamlet is concerned with existence.

patio11• 18 years ago

Quoth the Wiki (quite accurately tagged [citation needed]): Using E-Prime makes it harder for a writer or reader to confuse statements of opinion with statements of fact.

The above statement is an opinion dressed up as a fact which is nonetheless compatible with E-Prime. (Do you need a [citation needed] to mark self-negating statements?) Anyone with a high school command of the English language can conjure up their own alternatives. Here are three examples. Oops, scratch that: I present three examples below.

* E-prime renders me incapable of expressing a value judgment as a statement of fact, proving my superiority over you ignorant savages still using standard English.

* Anyone who cannot write a statement of fact in e-prime lacks sufficient proficiency in English to find their way out of a paper bag.

* Some people believe that e-prime decreases conflict, but I prefer the traditional route: wholesale slaughter of those who disagree with me. Why? Because one does not need "to be" to bathe in the blood of English professors who (pre-humously) possessed far too much free time.

nostrademons8• 18 years ago

All three of the above statements describe facts. Incorrect facts, but a fact does not become an opinion simply because of its wrongness.

* A single instance of a value judgment expressed as a statement of fact in E-prime falsifies this.

* The existence of one person who cannot write a statement of fact in E-prime yet can find their way out of a paper bag falsifies this.

* This presents 2 facts and an opinion. "Some people believe that e-prime decreases conflict": fact, find one. "I prefer the traditional route: wholesale slaughter of those who disagree with me": opinion, unverifiable. "Because one does not need 'to be' to bathe in the blood of English professors...": fact, simply bathe in their blood without uttering "to be".

The original Wikipedia comment presents an opinion, because it does not define an objective standard for what "harder" means. Hence the [citation needed] tag. If phrased as "10% fewer college students confused fact with opinion when using E-prime", that would present a fact.

Also note the wiggle word "makes" in the Wikipedia quote. While not forbidden by E-prime, wiggle words like "makes", "becomes", and "does" often let you express the same sort of sloppy thinking.

gjm113• 18 years ago

So what, for you, distinguishes "opinions" from "facts"? Can you give some examples of opinion-easily-mistaken-for-fact in ordinary English and explain what makes them harder to express in E-prime than other sentences of ordinary English? (Or, if you think that misses the point, what makes their E-prime equivalents less likely to spring to the mind of someone writing in E-prime?)

People often express aesthetic judgements as factual statements, and perhaps they shouldn't; so let's take some examples and see how they go into E-prime.

"Bach is the greatest composer who ever lived" means much the same as "No other composer wrote such great music as Bach did". That didn't feel at all difficult, and the E-prime version contains just as much opinion, which looks just as much like fact, as the E-notprime version.

"The Mona Lisa is overrated" means much the same as "Most people rate the Mona Lisa's merits more highly than it really deserves". Again, expressing that sentiment in E-prime gives no difficulty, and the E-prime version has the same problems as the E-notprime version while using more words.

Perhaps we should look at politics rather than the arts?

"The Republicans are concerned only to feather their own and their benefactors' nests": this one requires scarcely any change, and I might very easily have happened to express it in E-prime without trying. "The Republicans want to feather their own and their benefactors' nests, and don't care about anything else."

"Barack Obama is a charlatan whose only real skill is persuasive oratory." Well, "is a charlatan" doesn't go easily into E-prime, but one can say "Barack Obama's success in politics results entirely from his persuasive oratory, despite the false impression to the contrary that he is careful to give", and as usual the translation gives little trouble and preserves the undesirable features of the original.

So, I dunno, but it doesn't seem to me as if writing in E-prime makes it easier for opinions to look like facts. Would you care to enlighten me?

Remark: all of the above (apart from examples in quotation marks) is in E-prime, unless I goofed, and by far the most difficult thing to say without the copula was the first sentence of the second paragraph; and in fact "perhaps they shouldn't" (which I would in fact regard as opinion-easily-mistaken-for-fact) was the best I could do to replace things like "arguably aesthetic judgements are matters of opinion rather than fact". This may of course just indicate that I'm not good at writing in E-prime, but I do find it interesting that the main effect of doing so was to introduce an opinion-as-fact problem.

dmoney• 18 years ago

E-prime renders me incapable of expressing a value judgment as a statement of fact, proving my superiority over you ignorant savages still using standard English.

This sentence has awesomeness.

Darmani• 18 years ago

My high school banned freshman and sophomores from using to-be verbs in their English essays for a lot of the reasons discussed in the article.

I soon learned to get around that without thinking hard. Instead of saying "Macbeth is malicious," I'd say "Macbeth has/holds a degree of malice," which just makes my essays more cumbersome to read. And thus, the intention fell flat on me.

When I became a junior and was allowed to use to-be verbs again, I felt as if a great weight had been lifted from .

pg• 18 years ago

One of my HS English teachers did too. It at least made me notice such sentences, which were often insipid.

nostrademons8• 18 years ago

I don't think it works all that well in nonfiction. Too much nonfiction writing expresses equivalences between abstract concepts. Abstract concepts have trouble performing actions, because, well, they don't exist.

Fiction benefits greatly, though. Compare these paragraphs:

"Macbeth is malicious. He is staring straight at you. You are getting scared. You start walking away. Your footsteps are the only thing you can hear."

"Macbeth fixes you with a beady-eyed stare. Dark flickers of malice creep across his pupils, and the intensity of his gaze makes you take an involuntary step backwards. A shiver of fear runs down your back, skin crawling. You start tiptoeing backwards across the room, eager to put more distance between you and him, yet too scared to make a sudden move. Your tiny footfalls echo across the great hall, providing the only relief to the oppressive silence."

Yes, the second one uses more words, and yes, it describes more. That's the point. By eliminating "is", it forces you to think more carefully about what you want to say.

P.S. +1 for writing your comment in E-prime. ;-)

ShardPhoenix• 18 years ago

I honestly don't think that that second Macbeth paragraph is necessarily better than the first one. There's something to be said for succinctness/directness.

silentbicycle7• 18 years ago

Abstract concepts have trouble performing actions, because, well, they don't exist.

Exactly. But how many people have died because somebody truly believed their abstract concept literally existed?

http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm

Jebdm• 18 years ago

"When I became a junior and was allowed"

This bit isn't E-prime.

jaaron• 18 years ago

My high school senior year English instructor required the same of all her students. No "to be" words in any assignments. I have to say, the lesson did improve my writing.

mattmcknight• 18 years ago

Passive sentences are enjoyable. People that dislike them are missing the point. Abstract thought is obscured by concrete detail.

silentbicycle7• 18 years ago

Passive sentences don't have some sort of intrinsic enjoyability, you enjoy them. E-Prime makes that distinction clearer. That's what the wikipedia article tried to say as "Using E-Prime makes it harder for a writer or reader to confuse statements of opinion with statements of fact.": it makes opinions harder to pass off as a statement about an intrinsic essence. (Does such a thing even exist?)

eru5• 18 years ago

Unnecessary passive is hard to parse.

gasull• 18 years ago

I liked this article better than the one in Wikipedia:

http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm

tokenadult3• 18 years ago

This would do violence to Hamlet's soliloquy in Shakespeare's play.

decode• 18 years ago

Does anyone know how to express progressive aspects in E-Prime?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_aspect#English

Zak• 18 years ago

I would love to force writers of academic papers to use this style. I believe that the formal academic style removes the voice of the author from a work is dishonest. I'd much rather see "I think X because..." than "X is because...".

msg• 18 years ago

He and I share salient properties, as you and he share salient properties, as you and me share salient properties, and we form a cohesive unit. See how they run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly. I cry.

E-Prime lacks metaphors, and robs fuzzy language of all its indeterminate power.

nihilocrat2• 18 years ago

If you've read The Watchmen, this is exactly how Rohrschach speaks throughout the entire(?) book. It makes him sound like he's a walking, talking news ticker or weather report.

jcromartie• 18 years ago

In my opinion, E-Prime appears good for two things: dehumanizing English, and making it hard to say really stupid things!

English-Prime - English without "is"

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