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For the interactive-experiment design software, see E-Prime (software)
E-Prime, short for English Prime, is a modification of the English language that prohibits the use of the verb "to be" in all its forms.

History

D. David Bourland, Jr. proposed E-Prime as an addition to Alfred Korzybski's general semantics some years after Korzybski's death in 1950. Bourland, who studied under Korzybski, coined the term in an essay in 1965 entitled A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime (originally published in the General Semantics Bulletin). It quickly gained controversy within general semantics, partly because sometimes practioners of General Semantics saw Bourland as attacking the verb 'to be' as such, and not just certain usages.

Korzybski had found two forms of the verb 'to be'—the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication—to have structural problems. For example, the sentence "The coat is red" has no observer, the sentence "We see the coat as red" (where "we" indicates observers) appears more correct as to the facts about light waves and colour as determined by modern science, i.e., colour results from a reaction in the human brain. Korzybski advocated raising one's awareness of structural issues generally through training in general semantics.

The different functions of 'to be'

In use, the verb 'to be' has several distinct functions:

Bourland sees specifically the "identity" and "predication" functions as pernicious, but advocates eliminating all forms for the sake of simplicity. In the case of the "existence" form (and less idiomatically, the "location" form), one can simply substitute the verb "exists".

Criticism

E-Prime forces a writer to choose verbs and meanings carefully: the elimination of "to be" implicitly eliminates the passive voice and progressive aspect. Some defective verbs, such as "can", use paraphrases involving "to be" in some tenses and moods. This constraint alone accounts for much of the appeal of E-Prime to some of its advocates, since many stylists argue that such constructions occur too frequently in sloppy English writing. Of course it may also generate difficulties for some writers as they learn to use E-Prime.

Bourland and other advocates also suggest that use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of language that reduces the possibility for misunderstanding and for conflict. (See, for example, Bourland's article on fundamentals in the External links section.) Detractors might observe that some languages already treat equivalents of the verb "to be" very differently without giving any obvious advantages to their speakers. For instance, Arabic, like Russian, already lacks a verb form of "to be" in the present tense. If one wanted to assert, in Arabic, that an apple looks red, one would not literally say "the apple is red", but "the apple red". In other words, speakers can communicate the verb form of "to be", with its semantic advantages and disadvantages, even without the existence of the word itself. Thus they do not resolve the ambiguities that E-Prime seeks to alleviate without an additional rule, such as that all sentences must contain a verb. Similarly, the Ainu language consistently does not distinguish between "be" and "become"; thus ne means both "be" and "become", and pirka means "good", "be good", and "become good" equally. Many languages — for instance Japanese, Spanish, and Hebrew — already distinguish "existence"/"location" from "identity"/"predication".

E-Prime and Charles Kay Ogden's Basic English lack compatibility because Basic English has a closed set of verbs, excluding verbs such as "become", "remain", and "equal" that E-Prime uses to describe precise states of being. Changes such as those proposed for E-Prime also might eliminate enough ways to express aspect in African American Vernacular English to prove unworkable if applied indiscriminately to such language.

Alfred Korzybski has criticized the use of the verb "to be", and has been quoted as saying that "any proposition containing the word "is" its cognates 'are,' be' etc creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies". However, he also said that the phrase "the map is not the territory" which he coined was justified because "the denial of identification (as in 'is not') has opposite neuro-linguistic effects on the brain from the assertion of identity (as in 'is')." Noam Chomsky, widely regarded as the father of modern linguistics, has commented on Korzybski's criticism, addressing the fact that Korzybski seemed to have changed his mind. Chomsky said:

"Sometimes what we say can be misleading, sometimes not, depending on whether we are careful. If there's anything else Korzybski's work, I don't see it. That was the conclusion of my undergrad papers 60 years ago. Reading Korzybski extensively, I couldn't find anything that was not either trivial or false. As for neuro-linguistic effects on the brain, nothing was known when he wrote and very little of that is relevant now."

Chomsky, an anarchist, has also said that the greatest distorters of our perception are concentrations of power, such as states and corporations. He believes that power centers have the means to propagate their point of view and influence our perception of reality, much more than simply not using the verb "to be".

Discouraged forms

To be falls in the set of irregular verbs in English; some individuals, especially those who have learned English as a second language, may have difficulty recognizing all its forms. In addition, speakers of colloquial English frequently contract to be after pronouns or before the word not. E-Prime would prohibit the following words as forms of to be:

  • be
  • being
  • been
  • am
  • is; isn't
  • are; aren't
  • was; wasn't
  • were; weren't
  • Contractions formed from a pronoun and a conjugation of to be:
    • I'm
    • you're; we're; they're
    • he's; she's; it's
    • there's; here's; their's
    • where's; how's; what's; who's
  • E-Prime likewise prohibits contractions of to be found in nonstandard dialects of English, such as the following:
    • ain't
    • hain't (when derived from ain't rather than haven't)

Allowed words

E-prime does not prohibit the following words, because they do not derive from forms of to be. Some of these serve similar grammatical functions (see auxiliary verbs).

  • become
  • has; have
  • I've; you've
  • do; does; doing; did
  • can; could
  • will; would
  • shall; should
  • ought

Allowed words with prohibited homophones or homographs

The following words may either look (homograph) or sound (homophone) like a form of the word to be, but they do not have the same meaning.

  • its, the possessive case of the singular gender-neutral pronoun
  • it's and more generally ’s when derived from 'has'
  • hain't (in nonstandard dialects when derived from haven't rather than ain't)
  • Nouns that sound like forms of the verb to be:
    • bee, meaning an insect or a contest
    • being when used as a noun, as in Virginia Woolf's statement, "The artist after all is a solitary being"
    • B, M, and R, names of the letters (although M is pronounced distinctly from am in many dialects)

Examples

—modified from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
|| Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'
—Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
E-Prime Standard English
These short examples illustrate some of the ways to modify standard English writing to use E-Prime. These are some short examples to illustrate some of the ways that standard English writing can be modified to use E-Prime.
Roses seem red;
Violets seem blue.
Honey pleases me,
And so do you. 		Roses are red;
Violets are blue.
Honey is sweet,
And so are you.
Alice began to tire of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister read, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what use does a book have,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'

Examples of literal translation vs. translation "in the spirit" of E-Prime

In the original verse (Roses are red/Violets are blue/Honey is sweet/And so are you) the speaker expresses a belief in absolutes: "just as it is true that roses are red and honey is sweet, it is true that you are as sweet as honey". But E-Prime seeks to avoid this type of thinking and writing.

First example of literal translation

An E-Prime translation attempting to preserve the literal meaning of the original might read:

Roses look red;
Violets look blue.
Honey pleases me,
And so do you.

Second example of literal translation

The following example sacrifices the metaphor implied in line 4 of the original ("You are honey-sweet") to preserve one literal meaning of line 3, namely that honey tastes sweet, and therefore replaces line 4 with simile meaning something close to the original: "honey tastes sweet, and something of your nature makes you as sweet at that."

Roses look red;
Violets look blue.
Honey tastes sweet,
As sweet as you.

(This example assumes the speaker does not mean the addressee of the poem "tastes sweet," but does mean something like "I find you sweet as honey," and attempts to preserve the meter and rhyme of the original while still avoiding any form of the verb "to be.")

An example of translation "in the spirit" of E-Prime

In an attempt to subtract the assumption of absolutes ("what is") in the original, and to illustrate thought and perspective more in the spirit of E-Prime, the following translation attempts to state meaning directly from a hypothetical speaker's personal feelings toward the addressee, and express that meaning through the filter of that speaker's perceptions of the natural world. Therefore, the translation below changes the meaning of the poem.

Roses seem red;
Violets seem blue.
I like honey,
And I like you.

That version attempted to say something close to "I perceive the natural world in the way most people do. (Few people would dispute that the most common rose-variety seems red to the human eye, or that violets can appear blue.) Therefore, when I tell you I like honey, I tell you I like a thing most would agree tastes sweet and may also perceive as a pleasing thing in other ways. Therefore by claiming to like honey and to like you, I claim to make that statement with a certainty as absolute as human perception allows."

See also

External links

Forms of English | Semantics

E Prime

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "E-Prime".

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