3 ms·

>Edit: did you know you can do without “be” at all? It purely synthetic. Wouldn't it become rather difficult to do identity statements without "is"? E.g. "The

>Edit: did you know you can do without “be” at all? It purely synthetic. Wouldn't it become rather difficult to do identity statements without "is"? E.g. "The Tor network is an anonymous relay network overlaid on the internet". You could perhaps say "The Tor network works on top of the internet and performs anonymous routing", but that's not quite the same thing as saying the anonymous routing is Tor's reason for existence (as opposed to just something it happens to be doing). The E-Prime guys want the is-of-identity to be hard (if not impossible). But it's not obvious that everybody would agree with their sentiment.

nathell 5y ago
> Wouldn't it become rather difficult to do identity statements without "is"? Not really, depending on the language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula
guerrilla 5y ago
> "The Tor network is an anonymous relay network overlaid on the internet". Nitpick: This isn't an identity statement by the way: You can't replace "is" with "equals" here because it's being used to classify. It denotes subset, not equality or equivalence.