E-Prime
Encyclopedia
E-Prime is a version of the English language
that excludes all forms of the verb to be
. E-Prime does not allow conjugations of to be (am, are, is, was, were, be, been, being), archaic
forms (e.g. art, wast, wert), or contraction
s ('s, 'm, 're).
Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing. For example, the sentence "the film was good" could translate into E-Prime as "I liked the film" or as "the film made me laugh". The E-Prime versions communicate the speaker's experience rather than judgment, making it harder for the writer or reader to confuse opinion with fact.
'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
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.
, 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 idiom
atically, 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 a user of E-prime might use instead of to be.
tic style of language that reduces the possibility of misunderstanding and for conflict.
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.
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."
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
",
commented on Korzybski's view:
Rewilding
-advocate Urban Scout wrote his book "Rewild or Die" entirely in E-Prime. He states the rationale for this as follows:
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" can serve as a prerequisite to, or even as equivalent to, consciousness itself.
s 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 pronoun
s or before the word not. E-Prime would prohibit the following words as forms of to be:
s).
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". E-Prime disallows forms of statement such as "they say X is Y" or "most people are into Z" or "the taxpayer is angry" while allowing statements such as "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".
' 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 a 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
.
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."
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
that excludes all forms of the verb to be
To Be
"To Be" is the eighth single by Ayumi Hamasaki, released on May 12, 1999.- Information :"To Be" was released less than a month after her first number one single, "Love ." Hamasaki's first song to be composed by Do as Infinity composer DAI, "To Be" was unable to reach the top position on the Oricon,...
. E-Prime does not allow conjugations of to be (am, are, is, was, were, be, been, being), archaic
Archaism
In language, an archaism is the use of a form of speech or writing that is no longer current. This can either be done deliberately or as part of a specific jargon or formula...
forms (e.g. art, wast, wert), or contraction
Contraction (grammar)
A contraction is a shortened version of the written and spoken forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters....
s ('s, 'm, 're).
Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing. For example, the sentence "the film was good" could translate into E-Prime as "I liked the film" or as "the film made me laugh". The E-Prime versions communicate the speaker's experience rather than judgment, making it harder for the writer or reader to confuse opinion with fact.
History
D. David Bourland, Jr. (1928–2000) proposed E-Prime as an addition to Alfred KorzybskiAlfred Korzybski
Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski was a Polish-American philosopher and scientist. He is remembered for developing the theory of general semantics...
's general semantics
General Semantics
General semantics is a program begun in the 1920's that seeks to regulate the evaluative operations performed in the human brain. After partial program launches under the trial names "human engineering" and "humanology," Polish-American originator Alfred Korzybski fully launched the program as...
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
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
Human brain
The human brain has the same general structure as the brains of other mammals, but is over three times larger than the brain of a typical mammal with an equivalent body size. Estimates for the number of neurons in the human brain range from 80 to 120 billion...
.
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.
Different functions of "to be"
In the English languageEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, the verb 'to be' (also known as the copula) has several distinct functions:
- identityIdentity (philosophy)In philosophy, identity, from , is the relation each thing bears just to itself. According to Leibniz's law two things sharing every attribute are not only similar, but are the same thing. The concept of sameness has given rise to the general concept of identity, as in personal identity and...
, of the form "noun copula definite-noun" [The cat is my only pet]; [The cat is Garfield] - class membershipClass (philosophy)Philosophers sometimes distinguish classes from types and kinds. We can talk about the class of human beings, just as we can talk about the type , human being, or humanity...
, of the form "noun copula noun" [The cat is an animal] - predicationPredicate (grammar)There are two competing notions of the predicate in theories of grammar. Traditional grammar tends to view a predicate as one of two main parts of a sentence, the other being the subject, which the predicate modifies. The other understanding of predicates is inspired from work in predicate calculus...
, of the form "noun copula adjective" [The cat is furry] - auxiliaryAuxiliary verbIn linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
, of the form "noun copula verb" [The cat is sleeping]; [The cat is bitten by the dog]. The examples illustrate two different uses of 'be' as an auxiliary. In the first 'be' is part of the progressive aspect, used with "-ing" on the verb, and in the second it is part of the passiveEnglish passive voiceThe passive voice is a grammatical construction in which the subject of a sentence or clause denotes the recipient of the action rather than the performer...
, as indicated by the perfect participle of a transitive verb. - existenceExistenceIn common usage, existence is the world we are aware of through our senses, and that persists independently without them. In academic philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, being contrasted with essence, which specifies different forms of existence as well as different identity...
, of the form "there copula noun" [There is a cat] - locationLocation (geography)The terms location and place in geography are used to identify a point or an area on the Earth's surface or elsewhere. The term 'location' generally implies a higher degree of can certainty than "place" which often has an ambiguous boundary relying more on human/social attributes of place identity...
, of the form "noun copula place-phrase" [The cat is on the mat]; [The cat is here]
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 idiom
Idiom
Idiom is an expression, word, or phrase that has a figurative meaning that is comprehended in regard to a common use of that expression that is separate from the literal meaning or definition of the words of which it is made...
atically, 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 a user of E-prime might use instead of to be.
Rationale
Bourland and other advocates also suggest that use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmaDogma
Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization. It is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from, by the practitioners or believers...
tic style of language that reduces the possibility of misunderstanding and for conflict.
Some languages already treat equivalents of the verb "to be" differently without obvious benefits to their speakers. For instance, Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
, like Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, 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
Ainu language
Ainu is one of the Ainu languages, spoken by members of the Ainu ethnic group on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidō....
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
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, and Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
—already distinguish "existence"/"location" from "identity"/"predication".
E-Prime and Charles Kay Ogden
Charles Kay Ogden
Charles Kay Ogden was an English linguist, philosopher, and writer. Described as a polymath but also an eccentric and outsider, he took part in many ventures related to literature, politics, the arts and philosophy, having a broad impact particularly as an editor, translator, and activist on...
's Basic English
Basic English
Basic English, also known as Simple English, is an English-based controlled language created by linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden as an international auxiliary language, and as an aid for teaching English as a Second Language...
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.
Alfred Korzybski
Alfred Korzybski
Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski was a Polish-American philosopher and scientist. He is remembered for developing the theory of general semantics...
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."
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
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
, "[r]egarded as the father of modern linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
",
commented on Korzybski's view:
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.
Rewilding
Rewilding (anarchism)
Rewilding is the process of re-instating the role of keystone species to human society where the expression of this role appears lacking. The term originates in conservation biology in which "rewilding" stands for the re-introduction of keystone species into areas where such species appear locally...
-advocate Urban Scout wrote his book "Rewild or Die" 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.
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
John Ralston Saul
John Ralston Saul, CC is a Canadian author, essayist, and President of International PEN.As an essayist, Saul is particularly known for his commentaries on the nature of individualism, citizenship and the public good; the failures of manager-, or more precisely technocrat-, led societies; the...
who claims that a state of "permanent psychological discomfort" can serve as a prerequisite to, or even as equivalent to, consciousness itself.
Discouraged forms and rationale for typical replacements
To be belongs to the set of irregular verbIrregular verb
In contrast to regular verbs, irregular verbs are those verbs that fall outside the standard patterns of conjugation in the languages in which they occur. The idea of an irregular verb is important in second language acquisition, where the verb paradigms of a foreign language are learned...
s 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
Contraction (grammar)
A contraction is a shortened version of the written and spoken forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters....
forms of to be after pronoun
Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
s or before the word not. E-Prime would prohibit the following words as forms of to be:
Disallowed words
- be
- being
- been
- am
- is; isn't
- are; aren't
- was; wasn't
- were; weren't
- ContractionsContraction (grammar)A contraction is a shortened version of the written and spoken forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters....
formed from a pronounPronounIn linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
and a form of to be:- I'm
- you're; we're; they're
- he's; she's; it's
- there's; here's
- where's; how's; what's; who's
- that's
- E-Prime likewise prohibits contractions of to be found in nonstandard dialectDialectThe term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
s of English, such as the following:- ain't
- hain't (when derived from ain't rather than haven't)
- whatcha (derived from what are you)
- yer (when derived from you are rather than your)
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 verbAuxiliary verb
In linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
s).
- become;
- has; have; having; had (I've; you've)
- do; does; doing; did
- can; could
- will; would (they'd)
- shall; should
- ought
- may; might; must
- remain
- equal
Distinctions between self and others
Scholars of general semantics emphasize distinctions between different perceptions at different points in space (called "space-binding") 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 constructionsEnglish passive voice
The passive voice is a grammatical construction in which the subject of a sentence or clause denotes the recipient of the action rather than the performer...
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
Other
The Other or Constitutive Other is a key concept in continental philosophy; it opposes the Same. The Other refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is Other than the initial concept being considered...
or equivalent constructions such as "they" or "most people" or "the public" or "the taxpayer". E-Prime disallows forms of statement such as "they say X is Y" or "most people are into Z" or "the taxpayer is angry" while allowing statements such as "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".
Distinctions between past, present and future
E-Prime also discourages broad assertions crossing boundaries between past, present and future. General semanticsGeneral Semantics
General semantics is a program begun in the 1920's that seeks to regulate the evaluative operations performed in the human brain. After partial program launches under the trial names "human engineering" and "humanology," Polish-American originator Alfred Korzybski fully launched the program as...
' view of "time-binding" and modern theories of scenario analysis
Scenario analysis
Scenario analysis is a process of analyzing possible future events by considering alternative possible outcomes . Thus, the scenario analysis, which is a main method of projections, does not try to show one exact picture of the future. Instead, it presents consciously several alternative future...
and financial risk
Financial risk
Financial risk an umbrella term for multiple types of risk associated with financing, including financial transactions that include company loans in risk of default. Risk is a term often used to imply downside risk, meaning the uncertainty of a return and the potential for financial loss...
(based on statistics
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
) 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 a 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:
- To claim that one thing equals another is a claim only about the present with no reference to the future or the past—it can be disproved by direct testing (see falsifiabilityFalsifiabilityFalsifiability or refutability of an assertion, hypothesis or theory is the logical possibility that it can be contradicted by an observation or the outcome of a physical experiment...
). - To claim that a thing remains another is to assert that a relationship exists in the present that was also true in the past, without reference to the future at all—it can be disproved by reference to historyHistoryHistory is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
or memoryMemoryIn psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....
. - To claim that one thing becomes another asserts a relationship between the present and the future, without reference to the past at all—it can be demonstrated undesirable or potentially false (though not disproved) with reference to intent.
Since history
History
History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...
and memory
Memory
In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....
(representations of or belief
Belief
Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.-Belief, knowledge and epistemology:The terms belief and knowledge are used differently in philosophy....
about the past) are distinct in all philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
and ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
from plan
Plan
A plan is typically any diagram or list of steps with timing and resources, used to achieve an objective. See also strategy. It is commonly understood as a temporal set of intended actions, through which one expects to achieve a goal...
, vision
Visionary
Defined broadly, a visionary, is one who can envision the future. For some groups this can involve the supernatural or drugs.The visionary state is achieved via meditation, drugs, lucid dreams, daydreams, or art. One example is Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century artist/visionary and Catholic saint...
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
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
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
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
on snapshots of axioms about our own immediate present and the ways we plan and envision an uncertain and collective future. By contrast, theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
does assert high value for some unquestioned and eternal past-to-future equivalences. By substituting these three verbs, even without clarifying morality
Morality
Morality is the differentiation among intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are good and bad . A moral code is a system of morality and a moral is any one practice or teaching within a moral code...
(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
Risk analysis (Business)
Risk analysis is a technique to identify and assess factors that may jeopardize the success of a project or achieving a goal.This technique also helps to define preventive measures to reduce the probability of these factors from occurring and identify countermeasures to successfully deal with these...
.
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:- statements assuming possession or ownership ("he is the landlord") with more operationally exact ones ("he owns the building and manages it") that describe the implications that the title or credential assumes.
- statements assuming a combination of intention and probability ("they are moving") to distinguish the likely series of events and dependencies ("if they can sell their house they might move to Agrestic or if they can't, to Gardendale") in which the probability that an attempt to do something complex may fail is explicitly acknowledged and not assumed certain.
- statements assuming moral rightness or desirability of a state ("she is happy") with those that verify the difficulty of determining the state ("she smiles a lot, she seems happy, she would say something if her husband made her angry", etc.).
Examples
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.
|
To live or to die, I ask myself this. |
|
---- |
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For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.
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All power belongs to God: He has ordained the powers on earth.
|
|
---- |
|
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?'
|
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?'
|
Works Written in E-Prime
- Under The Eye of God, a science fiction novel by David GerroldDavid GerroldJerrold David Friedman , better known by his pen name David Gerrold, is an American science fiction author who started his career in 1966 while a college student by submitting an unsolicited story outline for the television series Star Trek. He was invited to submit several premises, and the one...
- A Covenant of Justice, a science fiction novel by David GerroldDavid GerroldJerrold David Friedman , better known by his pen name David Gerrold, is an American science fiction author who started his career in 1966 while a college student by submitting an unsolicited story outline for the television series Star Trek. He was invited to submit several premises, and the one...
- Worlds of Wonder: How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy by David GerroldDavid GerroldJerrold David Friedman , better known by his pen name David Gerrold, is an American science fiction author who started his career in 1966 while a college student by submitting an unsolicited story outline for the television series Star Trek. He was invited to submit several premises, and the one...
has a chapter about (and written in) E-Prime - The New American Standard Bible in E-Prime, composed by Dr.David F. Maas
- Rewild or Die, by Urban Scout
- Quantum PsychologyQuantum PsychologyQuantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You & Your World is a book written by Robert Anton Wilson, originally published in 1990.Some consider Quantum Psychology a follow-up to Wilson's earlier volume Prometheus Rising, mainly for the presence of practical exercises to demonstrate its...
, by Robert Anton WilsonRobert Anton WilsonRobert Anton Wilson , known to friends as "Bob", was an American author and polymath who became at various times a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian and self-described agnostic mystic... - Overcoming Procrastination, by Albert Ellis
- Drive Yourself Sane: Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics, by Susan Presby Kodish and Bruce I. Kodish
- Laws of FormLaws of FormLaws of Form is a book by G. Spencer-Brown, published in 1969, that straddles the boundary between mathematics and philosophy...
by G. Spencer-BrownG. Spencer-BrownGeorge Spencer-Brown is a polymath best known as the author of Laws of Form. He describes himself as a "mathematician, consulting engineer, psychologist, educational consultant and practitioner, consulting psychotherapist, author, and poet.".-Life:Spencer-Brown passed the First M.B...
(except for one statement)
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:- 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.
- "Effective writing techniques" are not relevant to general semantics as a discipline, and therefore should not be promoted as general semantics practice.
- 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.
- 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 we would also have to sacrifice.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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".
- 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
Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs
The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the United States Department of State fosters mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries around the world...
in the State Department
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State , is the United States federal executive department responsible for international relations of the United States, equivalent to the foreign ministries of other countries...
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."
See also
- General semanticsGeneral SemanticsGeneral semantics is a program begun in the 1920's that seeks to regulate the evaluative operations performed in the human brain. After partial program launches under the trial names "human engineering" and "humanology," Polish-American originator Alfred Korzybski fully launched the program as...
- English passive voiceEnglish passive voiceThe passive voice is a grammatical construction in which the subject of a sentence or clause denotes the recipient of the action rather than the performer...
- Grammatical voice
- Constrained writingConstrained writingConstrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern.Constraints are very common in poetry, which often requires the writer to use a particular verse form....
- Linguistic prescriptionLinguistic prescriptionIn linguistics, prescription denotes normative practices on such aspects of language use as spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and syntax. It includes judgments on what usages are socially proper and politically correct...
- Linguistic relativityLinguistic relativityThe principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...
External links
- The E-Prime Forum - discussion board about e-prime
- E-Prime! – The Fundamentals, by D. David Bourland, Jr.
- Working with E-Prime - detailed article, by E. W. Kellogg III and D. David Bourland, Jr.
- Speaking in E-Prime - by E. W. Kellogg III.
- Can E-Prime make us better writers? - an article about style
- Toward understanding E-prime
- E-prime: The Spirit and the Letter, by Ralph E. Kenyon Jr.
- Discovering E-Prime, by Elaine C. Johnson
- E-Prime and Linguistic Revision, by C. A. Hilgartner