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E-Prime: English without the verb 'to be'
- defenestration 11y agoThis is an interesting version of the English language. It is clarifying thinking and strengthening writing. Or should I say: I find this version of the English language interesting. It clarifies my thinking and strengthens my writing.
- geromek 11y agoI 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.
- chippy 11y agoWithin 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.
- logicchains 11y agoThe 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.
- lisivka 11y agoI 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.
- bbayer 11y agoCan you tell what your native language is? Finnish?
- murbard2 11y agoMy money is on Ukrainian based on the handle. (Slovak would be a candidate too but less of a fit for "many programmers, etc")
- lisivka 11y agoYou are right, I am Ukrainian. Ukrainian language is easy to parse: in most cases, just chop largest matching prefixes and suffixes from a word until word root will be left. Then suffixes can be used to understand sentence structure, while roots and prefixes can be used to understand meaning.
- WorldMaker 11y agoI 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.").
- Xophmeister 11y agoA quick scan through the text and, as far as I can tell, the whole article is written (modulo examples) in E-Prime.
- javawizard 11y agoAlmost - I count at least five occurrences outside of examples or quotes. Admittedly not bad for an article of its size.
- legulere 11y agoHow 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: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hight#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hight#English Maybe: "One calls her/him"?
- TeMPOraL 11y ago"He/she calls himself/herself X"?
- veridies 11y agoThis is what Spanish and Italian do normally. "Mi chiamo" and "me llamo" both translate to "I call myself." Other languages probably do the same, but I'm not qualified to speak about anything else.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoIn Polish we use either "mam na imię X" ("I have the name X") or "nazywam się X" ("I call myself X"). Honestly, I only just realized that the latter form is literally what we're talking about - for my whole life I just had it stored in my head as a phrase meaning "me.name == X".
- RyanMcGreal 11y agoFrench is similar: Je m'appelle Ryan (I call myself Ryan).
- Scarblac 11y agoDutch has a specific verb ("heten") just for "to be named". Jij heet veridies.
- megaman22 11y agoAlso German - Ich heisse X (that's supposed to be an eszett)
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- rasur 11y agoIf I'm not mistaken, Russian does not have the verb 'to be', right?
- re 11y agoI 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 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.
- oxplot 11y ago"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.
- level3 11y agoI 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. 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_written_in_E-Prime_considered_a_violation_of_npov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:E-Prime/Archive_1#Article....
- oxplot 11y ago"could not be expressed" is not a derivative of "to be". "be" there allows using "express" without needing the subject (e.g. "I can express my feeling" -> "My feeling can be expressed")
- oxplot 11y agoI have noticed an interesting effect where initially one is given the freedom to use all tools available to achieve a task, and over time restricted to an increasingly smaller subset. I find that this makes me optimize the process and in case of writing computer code, makes for easier to understand and more stable building blocks.
- matthewrudy 11y agoChinese uses "is" much more rarely than english. And that's something it takes a while to get used to. 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")
- peteretep 11y agoOn a tangent, Thai lacks "yes" and "no", and in theory one signals assent by repeating the verb or adjective, with or without a negative modifier. "Hungry, or?" - "Not hungry" "Take, no?" - "Take" In practice, people will often grunt for yes, and shake their head and break eye contact for no.
- chippy 11y agoIrish also has no "yes" and "no" also (generally speaking) One has to answer with an affirmative statement. "Do you like tea?" "I do" "Has mary got the message?" "she has" "ooh, it's wet outside today" "it is" "Are you happy?" "I am"
- plug 11y agoAnecdote warning, but this feels very common to me in "Hibernio-English" as well. I do it a lot when a simple yes/no would suffice, and I notice other people doing the same. I assume it's a construct that translated over from Irish. I must start listening out for native English speakers of different nationalities for comparison :)
- geomark 11y ago"Yes" is ใช่่ , romanized as chai [1] "No" is ไม่ , ไม่ใช่ , or เปล่า (mai, mai chai, bplao) There are many other words that also mean yes/no but those are the direct translations that are used extensively in everyday conversation. [1] http://www.thai2english.com/dictionary/yes.html http://www.thai2english.com/dictionary/yes.html [2] http://www.thai2english.com/dictionary/no.html http://www.thai2english.com/dictionary/no.html
- desdiv 11y agoSometimes 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?
- chippy 11y ago"Mount Everest has a height of 8km" Although, I do like your example as it gives a better indication of observer and subjectivity.
- mitchty 11y agoMount Everest measures 8km?
- infimum 11y agogood 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.
- Grue3 11y agoYou could say "Mount Everest rises to almost 8km [above sea level]".
- d0gbyt3 11y agoNo, none of you make a very strong argument, since it reaches nearly 9km in height. (damn this IS hard)
- nlawalker 11y ago"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. :)
- chippy 11y agoI 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 http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm I suggest you all check it out!
- shdon 11y agoHow do you introduce yourself? I find it difficult to find a replacement for: - I'm Steven - Hi, my name is Steven - I'm named|called Steven The only thing I could come up with "Hi, Steven, nice to meet you" sounds rather forced. The grammatical rules of English make it more difficult to use this compared to some other languages. E-prime seems very stinted, especially when asking questions: Is "less objective" really an advantage over "more subjective" for a hacker? And let me ask that example question as well. As somebody working in IT, I strive to come across as (nay, to be!) as objective and as precise as possible.
- air 11y agoHow do you introduce yourself? http://eprimedictionary.pbworks.com/My+name+is+Sally http://eprimedictionary.pbworks.com/My+name+is+Sally Has some suggestions. All seem pretty awkward to me.
- im_dario 11y agoBorrowed from Spanish and similar languages: - They call me Steven. Probably it sounds wrong for native English speakers.
- scott_karana 11y ago
- kriro 11y agoI 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.
- wibr 11y agoI'd rather not wear my code :-).
- logicchains 11y ago>Specifically if I were forced to use E' it would be very hard to argue certain philosophical positions. Objectivism vs. Subjectivism for example Some philosophers, e.g. early Wittgenstein, would argue that certain philosophical positions only exist by sleight of tongue, being based upon some form of incoherence that can only exist in imprecise language. From his Tractatus (note that he sort of changed his mind in his later work): "The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy -- and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one.
- geoleo 11y agoE' version... Some philosophers, e.g. early Wittgenstein, would argue that certain philosophical positions only exist by sleight of tongue because the philosophers who held these positions based their theories upon some form of incoherence that can only exist in imprecise language. From his Tractatus (note that he sort of changed his mind in his later work): "The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy -- and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one."
- d4nt 11y agoHaving 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.
- neikos 11y agoPerhaps, 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.
- d4nt 11y agoIt's not an in-depth critique, you're right. But there are some interesting themes here, and by mentioning 1984 I'm referencing some deep questions in (what I hope is) a fairly shorthand way. To be more explicit: 1. Do people 'think in a particular language' such that limitations in language limit their thought? This is something that psychologist have considered. The other comments in this thread suggest to me that there might be something in this. 2. Is it dangerous to allow any kind of authority that tells people what they can/can't say? If the answer to #1 is 'yes' then would such a group be too powerful to be allowed to exist?
- SixSigma 11y agoThe irony being that Orwell discouraged using the passive voice in "Politics and The English Language" 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/ http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jlebrech 11y agoan eprime linter? https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=eprime https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=eprime
- Amorymeltzer 11y agoIn particular is eprime-mode for emacs: https://github.com/AndrewHynes/eprime-mode https://github.com/AndrewHynes/eprime-mode
- masterponomo 11y agoI think, therefore...wtf?
- untothebreach 11y agoI think, therefore I exist.
- masterponomo 11y agoI'll allow it:-)
- amelius 11y agoSo, instead of "X is Y", we now we have to say "the equality relation has member (X,Y)". Very handy.
- saalweachter 11y agoI 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.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- saturdayplace 11y agoSeems like a useful exercise.
- dcuthbertson 11y agoFun to play with, nevertheless. :)
- albedoa 11y ago> But betwixt you and I you and me ;)
- nemoniac 11y ago"betwixt you and me"
- saalweachter 11y agoMore prescriptionism?
- r00fus 11y agoI 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.
- egypturnash 11y ago
- baldfat 11y agoCould we also change the number system. All teen numbers are switch to ten-# as in Eleven is Ten-One, twelve is Ten-Two.
- ashmud 11y agoThis reminds me of how most people seem to use "hopefully." I very seldom hear people say "I hope this works." Instead, almost every time I hear, "hopefully, this works." It seems to have a "language smell" of wanting a way to weasel out making a commitment to a particular stance or viewpoint.
- bediger4000 11y agoE-Prime has two very practical uses: 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.
- theOnliest 11y agoDo 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.
- jefurii 11y agoWhen 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.
- jballanc 11y agoThe 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.
- gliese1337 11y agoTurkish 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.
- mizchief2 11y agoNewspeak...
- bubalus 11y agoAs evidenced by some of these HN comments, E-prime encourages a voodoo-like approach to writing, in which you can magically make bad writing better just by doing a search-and-replace on a few words.
- muraiki 11y agoIn 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. :)
- function_seven 11y ago> 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.
- yongjik 11y agoSounds 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"?
- function_seven 11y agoThe 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. Think of it like the weights baseball players put on their bats during practice. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_doughnut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_doughnut)
- yongjik 11y agoI understand that it can be an interesting mental exercise. I'm just objecting to the underlying assumption that "be" makes sentences inherently unclear or subjective. For exercise, you could instead have excluded, say, every five-letter word, but (hopefully) nobody will claim that five-letter words make English unclear. It seems to me that E-prime works only because "be" is so common that you're forced to rewrite almost every sentence, yet it carries so little "semantic weight" that all such sentences can be rewritten with a bit of practice.
- coldcode 11y agoShakespeare would not have appreciated this. How do you say "to be or not to be" in EPrime?
- PaulAJ 11y ago17th Century language geeks thought that English should be more like Latin, so they banned split infinitives. 21st Century language geeks think that English should be more like Klingon, so they ban the verb "to be".
- lubesGordi 11y agoThis helps achieve the objective in general semantics of 'silence on the objective level.' In other words, that none of us have access to reality unfiltered by our senses and our linguistic programs, so it is best to not make statements that assume we do.
- pmoriarty 11y ago"none of us have access to reality unfiltered by our senses and our linguistic programs" That sounds like a statement about "reality unfiltered by our senses and our linguistic programs". It's not uncontroversial either, as lots of people have in fact claimed to have just such access.
- Dr_tldr 11y agoThis is unlikely to see widespread adoption. Boooom!