I didn't notice at first, but, like with some other Wikipedia articles, the editors of this one have enforced the E-Prime constraint on the article itself. After the possibility occurred to me and I went back to the page to check, I only found it particularly unnatural in the initial sentence, since almost every other article begins with the sentence "[subject] is [concise definition]."
For a similar example, the "Plot Summary" section of the page about "A Void" also conforms to its subject's constraint--in that case, avoiding the letter "e": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void#Plot_summary
It surprises me that avoiding forms of "to be" presents such a challenge for me--particularly with this sentence. I feel that it makes my writing sound more repetitive, since I end up replacing "X is" with wordy alternatives like "I find X" or "X seems"; while I'm used to forms of "to be" appearing dozens of times in a paragraph, my replacements stand out more when overused.
Actually the first sentence shows a loop-hole doesn't it?
> E-Prime, a prescriptive version of the English language, excludes all forms of the verb to be.
Doesn't the part parenthesised in commas have a kind of implicit 'is'?
For example E' is supposed to stop me saying things like 'Terminator is a good film and is 2 hours long', but I can say 'Terminator, a good film, lasts for 2 hours'.
I haven't checked the whole article, but the second paragraph contains the phrase "could not be expressed," so it doesn't completely adhere to E-Prime.
> I feel that it makes my writing sound more repetitive, since I end up replacing "X is" with wordy alternatives like "I find X" or "X seems"
In a way, you have found the purpose of E-Prime. While your speech or writing will use more words to avoid use of "to be," you will actually communicate more since you are describing more instead of simply making a proclamation. Word count will increase, but meaning and information will increase as well.
And yes, it did take me a little bit longer to write this comment following the constraint.
"my replacements stand out more when overused" - I have a different experience where repetition of "to be" derivatives equally stand out. As my first editing task after writing a paragraph, I eliminate such repetitions.
I have spent an entire week writing everything in E-prime. All texts, all IRC chats, all postings, every email.
I also spent the following week trying to speak in E-Prime. This proved very difficult but worth it. I had a notepad with me with several useful phrases in it. Even simple things like ordering from a coffee shop made me stumble. But I would try my best to speak in E-prime. I failed several times!
Writing appeared much much easier. It made emails and other postings less personal, less objective and more subjective and relative. I believe "Non Violent Communication" has many similarities to E-Prime.
Robert Anton Wilson wrote a very good introductory text explaining E-Prime. http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm I suggest you all check it out!
The argument for forbidding "to be" seems a little like the argument for forbidding "is a" (inheritance) relationships in programming: that any "is a" can be expressed more precisely as a "has a" and/or "does _".
I think it's interesting to take the argument even further, to argue for structural types (like interfaces in Go and Typescript, and objects in OCaml) over nominal types (like Java interfaces and Haskell typeclasses). The former just says "if Bar is an interface with method Blaz(int, int, bool), and Foo has a method Blaz(int, int, bool), then Foo is a Bar", while the latter require the programmer to explicitly specify that Foo is a (implements) bar.
I have suspect that naive architecture of a program is heavily affected by native language of the programmer. My native language is easy to parse (14kb parser can parse 98% of technical language, while 200Kb parser can also fix errors), logical and composable, which may be the reason why there is so high rate of good developers from my country: not because we are smarter than average, but because we are taught from birth to think logically.
I found it interesting too when looking at it from the lens of Inform 7. The reasoning that E-Prime gives to avoid "to be" is largely the reasoning that Inform 7 works very well with its multiple uses of to be. Primarily in that the "god-like objective" sentences make sense when authoring establishing facts in a world state ("The house is blue.").
Sometimes I use E-Prime as sort of a verbose flag for English.
Instead of: "Mount Everest is almost 8 km tall."
A verbose E-Prime version would sound something like: "I recall having read an Wikipedia article that reported the height of Mount Everest as almost 8 km."
Notice all the extra verbs in there.
"Recall"? Could I have mis-recalled?
"Read"? Could I have misread?
"Reported"? Could Wikipedia have misreported it, intentionally or unintentionally?
"Mt. Everest stands 8km tall." In many cases, it's all about moving away from declaring a property of a subject ("X is Y") to using the verb that causes the subject to exhibit the property.
I'm familiar with this concept but this is the first time I've heard of it formalized with a name, or used outside of creative/narrative writing. When I was in high school, a writing teacher made my class perform an exercise to memorize a superset of the "to be" verbs. The rationale was that, while these verbs are direct and objective, they are "flat" and fail to engage a reader.
In the case of descriptors/properties that simply require too much wrangling to find an appropriate verb - the case of color came up elsewhere in these comments, as in "the barn is blue" - the guiding rule is that those descriptors shouldn't be the focus of a sentence in the first place. "The barn was blue" is not interesting enough to stand on its own as a sentence and something else needs to take the verb. "The blue barn loomed over the landscape" or "The blue barn dominated his thoughts."
Writing a Wikipedia article in this style is certainly an interesting exercise, but given the goal of a Wikipedia article I don't think it's a good fit. An encyclopedia entry is not narrative and needs to be direct and objective.
As an aside, her exercise proved to be oddly effective, as I can still recite the list from memory: am, is, are, was, were, have, has, had, be, been, being, do, does, did, can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might, must. :)
good example, but in an everyday environment couldn't this all be inferred from context? when you say "Mount Everest is almost 8 km tall." I'll understand that you don't mean literally 8000.00m and that you somehow have gotten that information from some more or less reliable source etc.
1. Code documentation. If you write your comments and docs in E-Prime, you will find it a little more difficult to write ambiguous docs. In comments, E-Prime helps you avoid using "is" to describe a variable's contents and type with the same phrasing, which can confuse later readers.
2. ET speech in Sci-Fi movies or Tee Vee shows. If you write, say, a Vulcan's lines in E-Prime, you almost always end up with a slightly foreign, or "scientific" sounding prose.
Having read 1984, I find the desire to remove undesirable language from our vocabulary quite unnerving.
I realise it has the best of intentions, and nobody is proposing to remove 'to be' from everything. But the discussion here about how adopting E-Prime forces you to rethink what you mean to say, is eerily reminiscent of how Newspeak was used to control people's thought process.
Perhaps, but that sounds more like a kneejerk reaction rather than a real critique.
The idea behind it is supposed to show that by removing the verb 'to be', you have to think more on how to properly convey what you actually mean.
So in a sense it even allows you to get your actual thought process out there rather than having it dismissed for sounding overly harsh for example.
Contrast that to Newspeak, whose design is to limit and shape people's thoughts by external means (Another person chosing what is ok and what not), where as here /you/ get to choose what you say, it is merely the form that changes.
The people who wish to do this are labouring under a great many sceptical confusions and take saying ordinary things like "the pen is red" to be some god-like act. Ie. they wish to subjectivise everything.
It isn't god like at all, and we're not trapped within our own subjective nightmarish experiences for every doomed never to be talking about the world.
It's a very simple thing to make a claim about how the world is and for it to be true (eg. "the sun is aproximately 8 light minutes from earth"). Rewriting language on the basis of some mistaken sceptical pet-principle is the height of absurdity.
When I was in high school my mom (a marriage and family therapist) cajoled me into using something like E-Prime. I had to be really careful when making generalizations around her, and the big no-no was to say that something or someone "made me feel" a certain way. It was infuriating at the time but it certainly made me take responsibility for own my feelings and opinions. This experience probably influenced my decision to major in linguistics.
The Turkish language has no "to be" verb at all. In addition, Turkish has an extra verb tense not present in other languages which distinguishes between things that the speaker has observed directly from those they are only relaying 2nd hand.
Turkish lacks a explicit free morpheme (i.e., a separate word) for "to be", but it most definitely has translational equivalents, most notably the "zero copula" used for predicate adjectives and nouns in the simple present tense, declarative mood. All other situations involve an explicit inflectional marker (either a suffix or a clitic) that translates "is/are/were".
This is not unusual; lots of languages work that way. And in my experience, it does reduce the use of copula constructions compared to English, but not by much.
Incidentally, the "extra verb tense" you refer to is formally called "evidentiality", and is not considered the same thing as a" tense" by linguists. That's also fairly common in many languages, though it may seem exotic to English speakers.
I find this article really interesting. I am a native speaker of Spanish and the verb 'to be' is usually one of the first lessons we learn when we study English.
Spanish has to different verbs to depict the meaning(s) of 'to be' -> ser (exist) and estar (stay). I always thought merging those meanings into a single verb did not help to express the richness of the English language.
Within E-Prime some people think that using the verb "to be" for expressing stay, location etc should be allowed. For example: "The shop is over there" or "the cat is on the map" should be allowed. However I think the majority of E-Prime likers think that these should be excluded.
How do you communicate someone's name then?
You can't say "the name IS", or "He/she IS called".
The cognate to the word all the other Germanic languages use has become archaic and even lacks a present tense form:
AFAIK Russian, which lost the present tense of "to be", just says "my name X" (Меня зовут X).
Italian, which has the verb to be, nevertheless uses a different form: literally "I call me X" (mi chiamo X). "I'm X" (io sono X) would be understood but it's more the answer to who are you than to what's your name.
Do we also lose the progressive tense, then? How would one express something like "The car ran me over while I was walking to the store?"
I suppose "The car ran me over while walking to the store," but that's ambiguous, since some sort of walking car could have run me over, when I happened to be sitting on a bench outside the store.
In High School, my English teacher had us write essays in a format that incorporated E-Prime, but I had no idea that it was actually called "E-Prime". In addition to not using forms of "to be," we followed the SEXI format. This meant that every body paragraph was composed of four parts: Statement, Explanation, eXample, and Interpretation (one web site lists this as Importance). I think that in short essays each SEXI paragraph also had to be four sentences long.
The combination of E-Prime and SEXI was a real challenge to write at first, but with practice I found that it led to really solid papers with greater clarity of thought. It was a tremendous help in writing my college senior thesis.
Unlike the article, I didn't try to use either form in my comment. :)
> Unlike the article, I didn't try to use either form in my comment. :)
I'll give it a shot. This proved harder than I thought it would, and might read awkwardly. (Especially the "actually called 'E-Prime'" part. I can't think of a way of rewording that that doesn't sound weird.)
---
In High School, my English teacher had us write essays in a format that incorporated these rules, but I had no idea that it had a name: "E-Prime". In addition to not using forms of "to be," we followed the SEXI format. This meant we composed every body paragraph from four parts: Statement, Explanation, eXample, and Interpretation (one web site lists this as Importance). I think that in short essays each SEXI paragraph also couldn't number more than four sentences.
The combination of E-Prime and SEXI created a real challenge to write at first, but with practice I found that it led to really solid papers with greater clarity of thought. It tremendously helped in writing my college senior thesis.
I haven't read the paper/books but from the wiki article I find it problematic that "the code is red" is replaced with "we see the coat as red". Specifically if I were forced to use E' it would be very hard to argue certain philosophical positions. Objectivism vs. Subjectivism for example or to return to the coat...there could be a philosophical difference between the redness of the coat and the perception of it and not everyone wants to bundle those.
Due to this reason I find it rather curious that identity was picked as one of the troublesome uses. Identity seems like one of the most important uses of is for me.
Without thinking about it too deeply, formal logic would probably also be rather funky.
I bemoan rather than beatify prescriptionists who bequeath their own bespoke English upon the world, befuddled when the rest of us find it somewhere between befouling and beleaguering rather than bewitching. Belike I belabor the point; I can begrudgingly believe avoiding "to be" might bestow a little clarity, sometimes. But betwixt you and I, in excess it bewilders me.
I like it actually, it's like NPOV in Wikipedia, or those exercises for public speaking where you smile while talking to improve the lilt of your speech.
I could see why removing "god mode" for language would improve the clarity - both of the speech as well as the speaker's understanding.
Sounds more like a statistical misattribution to me.
1. Many unclear English sentences have "to be".
2. Therefore, let's disallow "to be" to make English clearer.
Well, the obvious alternate explanation is:
3. Since "be" is an extremely common word, for most attribute X, a subset of "English sentences with attribute X" will naturally have many sentences with "to be".
I mean, in what way is "Mars is round" any less clear/objective/interesting than "Mars orbits around the sun"?
The point of E' is to provide a kind of mental exercise. By forcing yourself to write this way, you discover clearer ways to make your point, or to convey information.
[+] [-] re|10 years ago|reply
For a similar example, the "Plot Summary" section of the page about "A Void" also conforms to its subject's constraint--in that case, avoiding the letter "e": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void#Plot_summary
It surprises me that avoiding forms of "to be" presents such a challenge for me--particularly with this sentence. I feel that it makes my writing sound more repetitive, since I end up replacing "X is" with wordy alternatives like "I find X" or "X seems"; while I'm used to forms of "to be" appearing dozens of times in a paragraph, my replacements stand out more when overused.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|10 years ago|reply
> E-Prime, a prescriptive version of the English language, excludes all forms of the verb to be.
Doesn't the part parenthesised in commas have a kind of implicit 'is'?
For example E' is supposed to stop me saying things like 'Terminator is a good film and is 2 hours long', but I can say 'Terminator, a good film, lasts for 2 hours'.
[+] [-] level3|10 years ago|reply
Edit: I didn't notice earlier while viewing the mobile version of the page, but the Talk page includes a discussion of whether or not to enforce E-Prime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:E-Prime/Archive_1#Article....
[+] [-] nkrisc|10 years ago|reply
In a way, you have found the purpose of E-Prime. While your speech or writing will use more words to avoid use of "to be," you will actually communicate more since you are describing more instead of simply making a proclamation. Word count will increase, but meaning and information will increase as well.
And yes, it did take me a little bit longer to write this comment following the constraint.
[+] [-] oxplot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taychen|10 years ago|reply
change: reintroduce the word "is" to the opening sentence, for clarity; fix sentence where a "speaker" becomes a "writer"
[+] [-] paulddraper|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chippy|10 years ago|reply
I also spent the following week trying to speak in E-Prime. This proved very difficult but worth it. I had a notepad with me with several useful phrases in it. Even simple things like ordering from a coffee shop made me stumble. But I would try my best to speak in E-prime. I failed several times!
Writing appeared much much easier. It made emails and other postings less personal, less objective and more subjective and relative. I believe "Non Violent Communication" has many similarities to E-Prime.
Robert Anton Wilson wrote a very good introductory text explaining E-Prime. http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm I suggest you all check it out!
[+] [-] logicchains|10 years ago|reply
I think it's interesting to take the argument even further, to argue for structural types (like interfaces in Go and Typescript, and objects in OCaml) over nominal types (like Java interfaces and Haskell typeclasses). The former just says "if Bar is an interface with method Blaz(int, int, bool), and Foo has a method Blaz(int, int, bool), then Foo is a Bar", while the latter require the programmer to explicitly specify that Foo is a (implements) bar.
[+] [-] lisivka|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WorldMaker|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] desdiv|10 years ago|reply
Instead of: "Mount Everest is almost 8 km tall."
A verbose E-Prime version would sound something like: "I recall having read an Wikipedia article that reported the height of Mount Everest as almost 8 km."
Notice all the extra verbs in there.
"Recall"? Could I have mis-recalled?
"Read"? Could I have misread?
"Reported"? Could Wikipedia have misreported it, intentionally or unintentionally?
[+] [-] nlawalker|10 years ago|reply
I'm familiar with this concept but this is the first time I've heard of it formalized with a name, or used outside of creative/narrative writing. When I was in high school, a writing teacher made my class perform an exercise to memorize a superset of the "to be" verbs. The rationale was that, while these verbs are direct and objective, they are "flat" and fail to engage a reader.
In the case of descriptors/properties that simply require too much wrangling to find an appropriate verb - the case of color came up elsewhere in these comments, as in "the barn is blue" - the guiding rule is that those descriptors shouldn't be the focus of a sentence in the first place. "The barn was blue" is not interesting enough to stand on its own as a sentence and something else needs to take the verb. "The blue barn loomed over the landscape" or "The blue barn dominated his thoughts."
Writing a Wikipedia article in this style is certainly an interesting exercise, but given the goal of a Wikipedia article I don't think it's a good fit. An encyclopedia entry is not narrative and needs to be direct and objective.
As an aside, her exercise proved to be oddly effective, as I can still recite the list from memory: am, is, are, was, were, have, has, had, be, been, being, do, does, did, can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might, must. :)
[+] [-] chippy|10 years ago|reply
Although, I do like your example as it gives a better indication of observer and subjectivity.
[+] [-] empath75|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] infimum|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grue3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bediger4000|10 years ago|reply
1. Code documentation. If you write your comments and docs in E-Prime, you will find it a little more difficult to write ambiguous docs. In comments, E-Prime helps you avoid using "is" to describe a variable's contents and type with the same phrasing, which can confuse later readers.
2. ET speech in Sci-Fi movies or Tee Vee shows. If you write, say, a Vulcan's lines in E-Prime, you almost always end up with a slightly foreign, or "scientific" sounding prose.
[+] [-] defenestration|10 years ago|reply
Or should I say: I find this version of the English language interesting. It clarifies my thinking and strengthens my writing.
[+] [-] d4nt|10 years ago|reply
I realise it has the best of intentions, and nobody is proposing to remove 'to be' from everything. But the discussion here about how adopting E-Prime forces you to rethink what you mean to say, is eerily reminiscent of how Newspeak was used to control people's thought process.
[+] [-] neikos|10 years ago|reply
The idea behind it is supposed to show that by removing the verb 'to be', you have to think more on how to properly convey what you actually mean.
So in a sense it even allows you to get your actual thought process out there rather than having it dismissed for sounding overly harsh for example.
Contrast that to Newspeak, whose design is to limit and shape people's thoughts by external means (Another person chosing what is ok and what not), where as here /you/ get to choose what you say, it is merely the form that changes.
[+] [-] mjburgess|10 years ago|reply
The people who wish to do this are labouring under a great many sceptical confusions and take saying ordinary things like "the pen is red" to be some god-like act. Ie. they wish to subjectivise everything.
It isn't god like at all, and we're not trapped within our own subjective nightmarish experiences for every doomed never to be talking about the world.
It's a very simple thing to make a claim about how the world is and for it to be true (eg. "the sun is aproximately 8 light minutes from earth"). Rewriting language on the basis of some mistaken sceptical pet-principle is the height of absurdity.
cf. http://blog.mjburgess.co.uk/2015/12/objectivity-and-humility...
[+] [-] SixSigma|10 years ago|reply
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
All rules are there to be broken
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...
[+] [-] dTal|10 years ago|reply
All language shapes thought. This is the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis".
"Newspeak" was an attempt to use this principle to shut down thought by taboo-ing entire classes of concept.
E-prime is an attempt to provoke thought by taboo-ing a single concept.
There are good and bad uses for everything.
[+] [-] jefurii|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jballanc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gliese1337|10 years ago|reply
This is not unusual; lots of languages work that way. And in my experience, it does reduce the use of copula constructions compared to English, but not by much.
Incidentally, the "extra verb tense" you refer to is formally called "evidentiality", and is not considered the same thing as a" tense" by linguists. That's also fairly common in many languages, though it may seem exotic to English speakers.
[+] [-] geromek|10 years ago|reply
Spanish has to different verbs to depict the meaning(s) of 'to be' -> ser (exist) and estar (stay). I always thought merging those meanings into a single verb did not help to express the richness of the English language.
[+] [-] chippy|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulAJ|10 years ago|reply
21st Century language geeks think that English should be more like Klingon, so they ban the verb "to be".
[+] [-] matthewrudy|10 years ago|reply
For example 中國很大 ("China is very big", literally "China very big")
But for a while you'll be tempted to add an "is" in there.
In fact you can use an "is" to change the emphasis.
Eg. "中國是很大的" (literally "China is very big adjective modifier")
[+] [-] legulere|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hight#English
Maybe: "One calls her/him"?
[+] [-] Semiapies|10 years ago|reply
In passing: This guy walking up, Jake, handles our servers.
Imperative: Call me Ishmael.
[+] [-] pmontra|10 years ago|reply
Italian, which has the verb to be, nevertheless uses a different form: literally "I call me X" (mi chiamo X). "I'm X" (io sono X) would be understood but it's more the answer to who are you than to what's your name.
[+] [-] theOnliest|10 years ago|reply
I suppose "The car ran me over while walking to the store," but that's ambiguous, since some sort of walking car could have run me over, when I happened to be sitting on a bench outside the store.
[+] [-] Xophmeister|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muraiki|10 years ago|reply
The combination of E-Prime and SEXI was a real challenge to write at first, but with practice I found that it led to really solid papers with greater clarity of thought. It was a tremendous help in writing my college senior thesis.
Unlike the article, I didn't try to use either form in my comment. :)
[+] [-] function_seven|10 years ago|reply
I'll give it a shot. This proved harder than I thought it would, and might read awkwardly. (Especially the "actually called 'E-Prime'" part. I can't think of a way of rewording that that doesn't sound weird.)
---
In High School, my English teacher had us write essays in a format that incorporated these rules, but I had no idea that it had a name: "E-Prime". In addition to not using forms of "to be," we followed the SEXI format. This meant we composed every body paragraph from four parts: Statement, Explanation, eXample, and Interpretation (one web site lists this as Importance). I think that in short essays each SEXI paragraph also couldn't number more than four sentences.
The combination of E-Prime and SEXI created a real challenge to write at first, but with practice I found that it led to really solid papers with greater clarity of thought. It tremendously helped in writing my college senior thesis.
[+] [-] kriro|10 years ago|reply
Without thinking about it too deeply, formal logic would probably also be rather funky.
[+] [-] saalweachter|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r00fus|10 years ago|reply
I could see why removing "god mode" for language would improve the clarity - both of the speech as well as the speaker's understanding.
[+] [-] nemoniac|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] albedoa|10 years ago|reply
you and me ;)
[+] [-] saturdayplace|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dcuthbertson|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egypturnash|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yongjik|10 years ago|reply
1. Many unclear English sentences have "to be".
2. Therefore, let's disallow "to be" to make English clearer.
Well, the obvious alternate explanation is:
3. Since "be" is an extremely common word, for most attribute X, a subset of "English sentences with attribute X" will naturally have many sentences with "to be".
I mean, in what way is "Mars is round" any less clear/objective/interesting than "Mars orbits around the sun"?
[+] [-] function_seven|10 years ago|reply
Think of it like the weights baseball players put on their bats during practice. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_doughnut)
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
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