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E-prime Information

E-Prime (short for English-Prime, sometimes spelled E′) is a form of the English language in which the verb to be does not appear in any of its forms. E-Prime therefore does not use the words "be", "is", "am", "are", "was", "were", "been" and "being". Neither does it use their contractions: "'s", "'m", and "'re".

Some people use E-Prime as a mental discipline to filter speech and translate the speech of others.[1] For example, the sentence "the movie was good" would correspond to the E-Prime sentences "I liked the movie" or "the movie made me laugh".

Contents

History

D. David Bourland, Jr. (1928–2000) proposed E-Prime as an addition to Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics some years after Korzybski's death in 1950. Bourland, who had studied under Korzybski, coined the term in a 1965 essay entitled A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime (originally published in the General Semantics Bulletin). The essay quickly generated controversy within the General Semantics field, partly because practitioners of General Semantics sometimes saw Bourland as attacking the verb 'to be' as such, and not just certain usages.

Bourland collected and published three volumes of essays in support of his innovation. The first (1991), co-edited by Paul Dennithorne Johnston bore the title: To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology [2] For the second, More E-Prime: To Be or Not II: 1994, Concord, California: International Society for General Semantics, he added a third editor, Jeremy Klein.

Bourland and Johnston edited a third book E-Prime III: a third anthology: 1997, Concord, California: International Society for General Semantics.

Korzybski (1879–1950) had determined that two forms of the verb 'to be'—the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication—had 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 specific in context as regards light waves and colour as determined by modern science, that is, colour results from a reaction in the human brain.

Korzybski pointed out the circularity of many dictionary definitions, and suggested adoption of the convention, then recently introduced among mathematicians, of acknowledging some minimal ensemble of terms as necessarily 'undefined'; he chose 'structure', 'order', and 'relation'. He wrote of those that they do not lend themselves to explication in words, but only by exhibiting how to use them in sentences.

Korzybski advocated raising one's awareness of structural issues generally through training in General Semantics.[citation needed]

Different functions of "to be"

In the English language, the verb 'to be' (also known as the copula) 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 might (for example) simply substitute the verb "exists". Other copula-substitutes in English include taste, feel, smell, sound, grow, remain, stay, and turn, among others which a user of E-prime might employ instead of to be.

Rationale

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Bourland and other advocates also suggest that use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of language that reduces the possibility of misunderstanding and for conflict.[3] Some languages already treat equivalents of the verb "to be" differently without obvious benefits to their speakers. For instance, Arabic, like Russian, 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 may lack compatibility because Basic English has a closed set of verbs, excluding verbs such as "become", "remain", and "equal" that E-Prime often uses to describe precise actions or states.

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 and pedantically to such language.

Alfred Korzybski criticized the use of the verb "to be", and stated that "any proposition containing the word 'is' [or its other forms 'are,' 'be', etc.] creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies"[4] However, he also justified the expression he coined — "the map is not the territory" — by saying that "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, "[r]egarded as the father of modern linguistics",[5] commented on Korzybski's "insight":

Sometimes what we say can be misleading, sometimes not, depending on whether we are careful. If there's anything else [in 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.[citation needed]

Rewilding-advocate Urban Scout wrote his book "Rewild or Die"[6] entirely in E-Prime. He states the rationale for this as follows:

“To be” prevents us from experiencing a shared reality; something we need in order to communicate in a sane way. If someone sees something completely different than another, our language prevents us from acknowledging the other's point of view by limiting our perception to fixed states. For example, if I say “Star Wars is a shitty movie,” and my friend says, “Star Wars is not a shitty movie!” We have no shared reality, for in our language, truth lies in only one of our statements and we can forever argue these truths until one of us writes a book and has more authority than the other. If on the other hand I say, “I hated Star Wars,” I state my opinion as observed through my own senses. I state a more accurate reality by not claiming that Star Wars “is” anything, as it could “be” anything to anyone.

Discouraged forms and rationale for typical replacements

To be belongs to 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 forms of to be after pronouns or before the word not. E-Prime would prohibit the following words as forms of to be:

Disallowed words

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).

Distinctions between self and others (or The Other)

In General Semantics distinctions between different perceptions at different points in space (called "space-binding") are emphasized over any universal God's eye view or assumed-shared or collective identity. By encouraging clarity on the active subject that "does" or wants or believes something, and disallowing passive constructions about the state of affairs (a common use of "to be"), E Prime makes it more difficult to hide assumptions in statements about The Other or equivalent constructions such as "they" or "most people" or "the public" or "the taxpayer". Forms of statement such as "they say X is Y" or "most people are into Z" or "the taxpayer is angry" are disallowed while "a clear majority of people say X always coexists with Y" or "most people approve of Z" or "the taxpayer doesn't like measure Q" or "lots of taxpayers express anger about Q" are allowed.

Distinctions between temporal perception framers: becomes/remains/equals

E Prime also discourages broad assertions crossing boundaries between past, present and future. General Semantics' view of "time-binding" and modern theories of scenario analysis and financial risk (based on statistics) emphasize a need to keep time frames of measurement and analysis carefully aligned. This avoids confusion between past events (which cannot be changed), the present (which one can test but not generally change) and future events (which one still has time to change even on a large scale), which can prevent noticing or taking an action to improve future outcome.

Replacing statements including "to be" with those using becomes, remains and equals divides perception of, and expressions about, time more operationally into actual cognitive categories that humans know how to act upon:

Since history and memory (representations of or belief about the past) are distinct in all philosophy and ontology from plan, vision or intent (representations of or will to change the future), statements that confuse these are category errors: No statement about history or memory can imply a similar statement about a plan or vision or intent, nor vice versa - a distinction sometimes credited to Hume who distinguished also the morality of a statement from its truth. The very different ways that humans process memory or agree on history (about the past) must be, according to most philosophers, kept distinct from ways we employ logic on snapshots of axioms about our own immediate present and the ways we plan and envision an uncertain and collective future. By contrast, theology does assert high value for some unquestioned and eternal past-to-future equivalences. By substituting these three verbs, even without clarifying morality (ought, shall, should, must) or the actor(s) who do or did something, becomes/remains/equals makes clear what time frame of relationship is asserted, and disallows assuming one stable past/present/future timeline - known as single scenario planning or blind linearity and considered a grave error in risk analysis.

Other common replacement forms

Users of E-Prime also generally encourage other replacements that clarify subject, object, time frame, intent and scope of relationships, replacing:

Deliberate psychological discomfort: the E Prime frame of mind

Because they expose more assumptions, E Prime statements may often invite challenge more readily than those made using the verb to be. This is desirable according to philosopher John Ralston Saul who claims that a state of "permanent psychological discomfort"[7] can be equated as a prerequisite to, or even as equivalent to, consciousness itself. Making statements deliberately open to challenge, or using tools such as open public wikis in which an error can be questioned or corrected by literally anyone, demonstrates more such consciousness and ability to withstand discomfort and therefore more social awareness.

Examples

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The following short examples illustrate some of the ways that standard English writing can be modified to use E-Prime.

Standard English E-Prime
To be or not to be, That is the question.
— Shakespeare's Hamlet
 To exist or not to exist, I ask this question.
— modified from Shakespeare's Hamlet[8]
Roses are red; Violets are blue. Honey is sweet, And so are you. Roses look red; Violets look blue. Honey tastes sweet, And so do you.
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
 Alice had just begun 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 has a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'
— modified from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Works Written in E-Prime

Related Writings

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in 1878:

The history of those feelings, by virtue of which we consider a person responsible, the so-called moral feelings, is divided into the following main phases. At first we call particular acts good or evil without any consideration of their motives, but simply on the basis of their beneficial or harmful consequences. Soon, however, we forget the origin of these terms and imagine that the quality 'good' or 'evil' is inherent in the actions themselves, without consideration of their consequences; this is the same error language makes when calling the stone itself hard, the tree itself green—that is, we take the effect to be the cause.[10]

Criticisms

Many authors have questioned E-Prime's effectiveness at improving readability and reducing prejudice (Lakoff, 1992; Cullen, 1992; Parkinson, 1992; Kenyon, 1992; French, 1992, 1993; Lohrey, 1993). These authors observed that a communication under the copula ban can remain extremely unclear and imply prejudice, while losing important speech patterns, such as identities and identification. James D. French, a computer programmer at the University of California, Berkeley, summarized ten arguments against E-Prime (in the context of General Semantics) as follows[11]:

  1. The elimination of a whole class of sentences results in fewer alternatives and is likely to make writing less rather than more interesting. One can improve bad writing more by reducing use of the verb 'to be' than by eliminating it.
  2. "Effective writing techniques" are not relevant to general semantics as a discipline, and therefore should not be promoted as general semantics practice.
  3. The context often ameliorates the possible harmful effects from the use of the is-of-identity and the is-of-predication, so it is not necessary to eliminate all such sentences. For example "George is a Judge" in response to a question of what he does for a living would not be a questionable statement.
  4. To be statements do not only convey identity but also asymmetrical relations ("X is higher than Y"); negation ("A is not B"); location ("Berlin is in Germany"); auxiliary ("I am going to the store") etc., forms which would also have to be sacrificed.
  5. Eliminating to be from English has little effect on eliminating identity. For example, a statement of apparently equal identification, "The silly ban on copula continues" can be made without the copula assuming an identity rather than asserting it, consequently hampering our awareness of it.
  6. Identity-in-the-language is not the same thing as the far more important identity-in-reaction (identification). General semantics cuts the link between the two through the practice of silence on the objective levels, adopting a self-reflexive attitude, e.g., "as I see it" "it seems to me" etc, and by the use of quotation marks - without using E-Prime.
  7. The advocates of E-Prime have not proven that it is easier to eliminate the verb to be from the English language than it is to eliminate just the is-of-identity and the is-of-predication. It may well be easier to do the latter for many people.
  8. One of the best languages for time-binding is mathematics, which relies heavily on the notion of equivalence and equality. For the purposes of time-binding, it may be better to keep to be in the language while only cutting the link between identity-in-the-language and identification-in-our-reactions.
  9. A civilization advances when it can move from the idea of individual trees to that of forest. E-Prime tends to make the expression of higher orders of abstraction more difficult, e.g. a student is more likely to be described in E-Prime as "She attends classes at the university".
  10. E-Prime makes no distinction between statements that cross the principles of general semantics and statements that do not. It lacks consistency with the other tenets of general semantics and should not be included into the discipline.

According to an article (written in E-Prime and advocating a role for E-Prime in ESL and EFL programs) published by the Office of English Language Programs of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in the State Department of the United States, "Requiring students to avoid the verb to be on every assignment would deter students from developing other fundamental skills of fluent writing."[12]

See also

References

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (January 2009)

Footnotes

  1. ^

    Note the approach of Zimmerman in using E-Prime as a tool to improve linguistic style: Zimmerman, Daniel (Fall, 2001). "E-Prime as a Revision Strategy". ETC: A Review of General Semantics 58.3. pp. 340–347. http://www.ctlow.ca/E-Prime/zimmerman.html. Retrieved 2009-01-10. "Using E-Prime, I require students to paraphrase about half their sentences -- admittedly, in a special way, but using as stylistic models the best of the rest of their sentences, already written in 'native' E-Prime. The more gracefully and effectively they learn to do this, the more they begin to sound like themselves as writers, rather than like all the other writers around them sound about half the time."

  2. ^ Bourland, D. David; Johnston, Paul Dennithorne, eds (1991). To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology. San Francisco: International Society for General Semantics. pp. 185. ISBN 0918970385.
  3. ^ Bourland, D. David (Fall 1989). "TO BE OR NOT TO BE: E-Prime as a Tool for Critical Thinking: E-Prime! — The Fundamentals". ETC: A Review of General Semantics, Vol. 46, No. 3, Fall 1989. International Society for General Semantic. http://web.archive.org/web/20080103161605/http://www.esgs.org/uk/art/epr1.htm. Retrieved 2009-05-19. "In writing and talking [E-Prime] provides a method for materially reducing 'the human misunderstanding.'"
  4. ^ Korzybski, Alfred (1933). Science and Sanity.
  5. ^ "Great thinkers of our time - Noam Chomsky" New Statesman 2003-07-14 http://www.newstatesman.com/200307140016. Retrieved 2009-10-06 "Noam Chomsky[...] Regarded as the father of modern linguistics, founder of the field of transformational-generative grammar [...]"
  6. ^ "Rewild or Die - Urban Scout". 2010-03-04. http://www.urbanscout.com. Retrieved 2010-03-30.
  7. ^ The Unconscious Civilization, John Ralston Saul
  8. ^ Compare Hamby, Barbara (2006). The Alphabet of Desire. Orchises Press. p. 24. ISBN 9781932535105. http://books.google.com/?id=lLkDP_T1m-MC. Retrieved 2010-02-27. "[...] Hamlet would be fresh out of luck. What would he say, To exist or not to exist?"
  9. ^ http://www.generalsemantics.org/index.php/component/content/article/5-archives/287-e-prime-bible.html
  10. ^ Nietzsche, Friedrich; Zimmern, Helen (translator) (2008) [1878], Human, All-Too-Human, Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth Editions Limited, pp. 38-39, ISBN 9781840220834
  11. ^ Compare: French, James D (1992). "The Top Ten Arguments against E-Prime". ETC: A Review of General Semantics (Institute of General Semantics) 49 (2): 75–79.
  12. ^ Herbert, John C. "English Prime as an Instructional Tool in Writing Classes" English Teaching Forum Online United States Department of State http://web.archive.org/web/20061007112531/http://exchanges.state.gov/forum/vols/vol41/no3/p26.htm. Retrieved 2009-10-06 "When applying the aforementioned ideas to any writing assignment, teachers must make sure their students know that the proposed set of guidelines represents only one means to an end and does not present an end in itself. Requiring students to avoid the verb to be on every assignment would deter students from developing other fundamental skills of fluent writing. However, introducing E-Prime restrictions for at least one assignment forces students to spend more time with their essays, to think critically about acceptable grammar and vocabulary, and to search for new, or nearly forgotten, vocabulary."

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