E Prime
Dr. English language modified by prohibiting the use of the verb "to be".
E-Prime arose from Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics and his observation that English speakers most often use "to be" to express dogmatic beliefs or assumptions or to avoid expressing opinions and feelings as such.
The verb can express several distinct meanings:
- identity, of the form "noun be noun" [The cat is an animal]
- predication, of the form "noun be adjective" [The cat is furry]
- auxiliary, of the form "noun be verb" [The cat is sleeping]
- existence, of the form "noun be" [There is a cat]
- location, of the form "noun be place" [The cat is on the mat]
Bourland sees specifically the "identity" and "predication" forms as pernicious, but advocates eliminating all forms for the sake of simplicity. In the case of the "existence" form (and less idiomatically, the "location" form), one can simply substitute the verb "exists".
Note also that the elimination of "to be" implicitly eliminates the passive voice and progressive aspect [(following neutral?), which may explain part of the difficulty of some people when learning to use E-Prime].
Its advocates assert that the use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of writing that reduces the possibility for misunderstanding and conflict. One might speculate on the usefulness of E-Prime in constructing encyclopaedias concerned with maintaining a neutral point of view. Detractors might observe that some languages already treat the word very differently without giving any obvious advantages to their speakers. For instance, Arabic, like Russian, already lacks a verb form of "to be" or "is" in the present tense. If one wanted to assert, in Arabic, that "an apple is red", the literal translation wouldn't be "the apple looks red", but "the apple red". That is, the verb form of "to be" can be communicated even if the word itself doesn't exist. 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 and Hebrew – already distinguish "existence"/"location" from "identity"/"predication".
One cannot use E-Prime with C. K. Ogden's Basic English because Basic has a closed set of verbs that does not include the verbs such as "become", "remain", and "equal" that E-Prime uses to express states of "being".
Examples
| E-Prime
| Standard English
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| These short examples illustrate some of the ways to modify standard English writings to use E-Prime.
| These are some short examples to illustrate some of the ways that standard English writing can be modified to use E-Prime.
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Roses appear red;
Violets appear blue.
Honey tastes sweet,
And you behave sweetly as well.
| Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
| Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'
- —Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
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See also
