
English-Prime - English without "is" - silentbicycle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
======
nostrademons
One of my school's founders gave an essay-writing workshop when we applied to
colleges, and told me about this when critiquing my essay.

IMHO, you should think of it as a good exercise instead of a writing style.
You don't need to eliminate all forms of "to be" in your writing. However,
thinking about how you would do so forces you to choose your words more
carefully. You can add "to be" back in later once you've mastered E-prime.

You may want to try the same thing with adverbs and prepositional phrases.
Eliminate them, and see how it affects your writing. Then reintroduce them
only if they make your writing more clear.

In programming, you can perform similar exercises with mutation. Eliminate all
assignment statements, and see how you structure your code in their absence.
Then add them back as necessary.

~~~
jrockway
> Eliminate all assignment statements, and see how you structure your code in
> their absence. Then add them back as necessary.

Actually, I think removing points is the typical exercise. Removing assignment
is too easy :)

<http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Pointfree>

~~~
newt0311
Agreed. Recursion and first-class functions are something that most CS
students know way too little about.

~~~
eru
You can also remove (explicit) recursion --- which almost the same as removing
points in practise.

~~~
newt0311
Not quite. The Y combinator does real work. Its not just an extra point
attached at the end. Furthermore, getting rid of implicit recursion does not
make one a better programmer (imho).

~~~
eru
But it makes your programs easier to read in many cases. Abstracting the
control flow with combinators like filter, map and other folds also tends to
make my programs less error prone.

------
patio11
Quoth the Wiki (quite accurately tagged [citation needed]): _Using E-Prime
makes it harder for a writer or reader to confuse statements of opinion with
statements of fact._

The above statement is an opinion dressed up as a fact which is nonetheless
compatible with E-Prime. (Do you need a [citation needed] to mark self-
negating statements?) Anyone with a high school command of the English
language can conjure up their own alternatives. Here are three examples. Oops,
scratch that: I present three examples below.

* E-prime renders me incapable of expressing a value judgment as a statement of fact, proving my superiority over you ignorant savages still using standard English.

* Anyone who cannot write a statement of fact in e-prime lacks sufficient proficiency in English to find their way out of a paper bag.

* Some people believe that e-prime decreases conflict, but I prefer the traditional route: wholesale slaughter of those who disagree with me. Why? Because one does not need "to be" to bathe in the blood of English professors who (pre-humously) possessed far too much free time.

~~~
nostrademons
All three of the above statements describe facts. Incorrect facts, but a fact
does not become an opinion simply because of its wrongness.

* A single instance of a value judgment expressed as a statement of fact in E-prime falsifies this.

* The existence of one person who cannot write a statement of fact in E-prime yet can find their way out of a paper bag falsifies this.

* This presents 2 facts and an opinion. "Some people believe that e-prime decreases conflict": fact, find one. "I prefer the traditional route: wholesale slaughter of those who disagree with me": opinion, unverifiable. "Because one does not need 'to be' to bathe in the blood of English professors...": fact, simply bathe in their blood without uttering "to be".

The original Wikipedia comment presents an opinion, because it does not define
an objective standard for what "harder" means. Hence the [citation needed]
tag. If phrased as "10% fewer college students confused fact with opinion when
using E-prime", that would present a fact.

Also note the wiggle word "makes" in the Wikipedia quote. While not forbidden
by E-prime, wiggle words like "makes", "becomes", and "does" often let you
express the same sort of sloppy thinking.

~~~
gjm11
So what, for you, distinguishes "opinions" from "facts"? Can you give some
examples of opinion-easily-mistaken-for-fact in ordinary English and explain
what makes them harder to express in E-prime than other sentences of ordinary
English? (Or, if you think that misses the point, what makes their E-prime
equivalents less likely to spring to the mind of someone writing in E-prime?)

People often express aesthetic judgements as factual statements, and perhaps
they shouldn't; so let's take some examples and see how they go into E-prime.

"Bach is the greatest composer who ever lived" means much the same as "No
other composer wrote such great music as Bach did". That didn't feel at all
difficult, and the E-prime version contains just as much opinion, which looks
just as much like fact, as the E-notprime version.

"The Mona Lisa is overrated" means much the same as "Most people rate the Mona
Lisa's merits more highly than it really deserves". Again, expressing that
sentiment in E-prime gives no difficulty, and the E-prime version has the same
problems as the E-notprime version while using more words.

Perhaps we should look at politics rather than the arts?

"The Republicans are concerned only to feather their own and their
benefactors' nests": this one requires scarcely any change, and I might very
easily have happened to express it in E-prime without trying. "The Republicans
want to feather their own and their benefactors' nests, and don't care about
anything else."

"Barack Obama is a charlatan whose only real skill is persuasive oratory."
Well, "is a charlatan" doesn't go easily into E-prime, but one can say "Barack
Obama's success in politics results entirely from his persuasive oratory,
despite the false impression to the contrary that he is careful to give", and
as usual the translation gives little trouble and preserves the undesirable
features of the original.

So, I dunno, but it doesn't seem to me as if writing in E-prime makes it
easier for opinions to look like facts. Would you care to enlighten me?

Remark: all of the above (apart from examples in quotation marks) is in
E-prime, unless I goofed, and by far the most difficult thing to say without
the copula was the first sentence of the second paragraph; and in fact
"perhaps they shouldn't" (which I would in fact regard as opinion-easily-
mistaken-for-fact) was the best I could do to replace things like "arguably
aesthetic judgements are matters of opinion rather than fact". This may of
course just indicate that I'm not good at writing in E-prime, but I do find it
interesting that the main effect of doing so was to _introduce_ an opinion-as-
fact problem.

~~~
silentbicycle
> "The Mona Lisa is overrated" means much the same as "Most people rate the
> Mona Lisa's merits more highly than it really deserves".

The former sentence implies the existence of an essential characteristic of
_being overrated_ , while the latter makes an observation, possibly incorrect.
I think facts vs. opinions isn't so much the relevant distinction here as
things being as they are because of Aristotelian essences vs. happening
because of action (in this case, judgement).

With the Barack Obama example, the is-ness crept back in with "false
impression" ("the impression is false"); rewriting English the whole way down
seems excessively cumbersome to me, of course, but I've found doing it as an
exercise to helps me recognize when ideas are reified _largely due to language
quirks_.

~~~
gjm11
I think the dubious assumptions in the two versions of the Mona Lisa one are
equivalent; what's implied by "being overrated" is the same as what's implied
by "really deserves".

If you think "false impression" is bad because "the impression is false" has a
copula in it, then congratulations: you just abolished adjectives. "... the
red bicycle ..." -> "the bicycle is red". Whatever the problem is here, it
isn't is-ness.

I completely agree that rewriting what you say in a restricted subset of
English (or whatever natural language) has value for seeing what assumptions
are slipping in unobserved. It's totally not clear to me that "is"-less
English is any better for this purpose than, say, adverb-less English or
e-less English; I suspect that most of the gain comes from forcing yourself to
write _with a strong constraint_ , which makes you think more. It's not so
very different from (one reason) why poetic and musical forms (sonnets, sonata
form, haiku, fugue, ...) work well.

I wouldn't be surprised if forbidding "is" were a bit better than those, for
various reasons. But I suspect that the bulk of the winnage comes from the
mere fact of being constrained.

~~~
silentbicycle
> "... writing _with a strong constraint_ , which makes you think more."

I agree. E-Prime was inspired by General Semantics ( see e.g.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Semantics> , the "Overview" section on
that page seems sufficient), though, and had a much more specific motive than
just improving writing. While E-Prime can focus too much on just "is", I think
it seems like an approachable introduction to the ideas.

I also thought they might be of interest here, because there's a neat parallel
between them and e.g. thinking about is-a/has-a in OO design, the ways having
quote empowers Lisp, etc.

------
randomwalker
Many languages get along just fine without that verb, such as my native
language, Tamil. I learnt a tiny bit of Russian a long time ago, and --
someone correct me if I'm wrong -- I don't think Russian has it either. For
instance, "what is your name?" is "kak vas zovut?" Also, Mandarin has _shi_
which can be used in some senses of "to be" llsted in the article but not
others; for instance, identity but not predication.

So I dug a little deeper and found this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-
European_copula>

"A feature common to all Indo-European languages is the presence of a verb
corresponding to the English verb to be."

I'm a bit of a language nerd, so this is very interesting.

~~~
jballanc
While Turkish does have a form of "to be", it's not used the way you would
expect. Many sentences that would otherwise use some conjugated form of "to
be" in Turkish will simply do without a verb.

For example, introducing yourself you'd say "I'm Joe". In Turkish, this is
"Benim Joe", where "Benim" is the first person singular pronoun with the first
person possessive suffix. Many other sentences have no verb, which can make
learning Turkish difficult.

~~~
eru
I actually found learning Turkish quite pleasing. But perhaps I just love to
learn strange (for me) things.

------
Darmani
My high school banned freshman and sophomores from using to-be verbs in their
English essays for a lot of the reasons discussed in the article.

I soon learned to get around that without thinking hard. Instead of saying
"Macbeth is malicious," I'd say "Macbeth has/holds a degree of malice," which
just makes my essays more cumbersome to read. And thus, the intention fell
flat on me.

When I became a junior and was allowed to use to-be verbs again, I felt as if
a great weight had been lifted from .

~~~
nostrademons
I don't think it works all that well in nonfiction. Too much nonfiction
writing expresses equivalences between abstract concepts. Abstract concepts
have trouble performing actions, because, well, they don't exist.

Fiction benefits greatly, though. Compare these paragraphs:

"Macbeth is malicious. He is staring straight at you. You are getting scared.
You start walking away. Your footsteps are the only thing you can hear."

"Macbeth fixes you with a beady-eyed stare. Dark flickers of malice creep
across his pupils, and the intensity of his gaze makes you take an involuntary
step backwards. A shiver of fear runs down your back, skin crawling. You start
tiptoeing backwards across the room, eager to put more distance between you
and him, yet too scared to make a sudden move. Your tiny footfalls echo across
the great hall, providing the only relief to the oppressive silence."

Yes, the second one uses more words, and yes, it describes more. _That's the
point._ By eliminating "is", it forces you to think more carefully about what
you want to say.

P.S. +1 for writing your comment in E-prime. ;-)

~~~
ShardPhoenix
I honestly don't think that that second Macbeth paragraph is necessarily
better than the first one. There's something to be said for
succinctness/directness.

~~~
kirse
_necessarily better_

It all depends on the audience.

The first sentence is "better" for passing an exam the next day, but hardly
enjoyable if one is to immerse themselves in a work of fiction.

------
mattmcknight
Passive sentences are enjoyable. People that dislike them are missing the
point. Abstract thought is obscured by concrete detail.

~~~
silentbicycle
Passive sentences don't have some sort of intrinsic _enjoyability_ , _you_
enjoy them. E-Prime makes that distinction clearer. That's what the wikipedia
article tried to say as "Using E-Prime makes it harder for a writer or reader
to confuse statements of opinion with statements of fact.": it makes opinions
harder to pass off as a statement about an intrinsic essence. (Does such a
thing even exist?)

------
daveambrose
Interesting. What's the difference between this syntax and merely eliminating
passive voice?

"E-Prime, short for English-Prime, is a modified English syntax and vocabulary
lacking all forms of the verb to be: be, is, am, are, was, were, been and
being, and also their contractions. Sentences composed in E-Prime seldom
contain the passive voice, which in turn may force the writer or speaker to
think differently. By eliminating most uses of the passive voice, E-Prime
compels the writer to explicitly acknowledge the agent of a sentence, possibly
making the written text easier to read and understand."

~~~
nihilocrat
"I am Sam" is active voice, and it's using the verb 'to be', because it uses
'am'. Eliminating the 'am' in this case would be pretty difficult, but another
poster has reworked a line of Hamlet that uses "I am" and it's a pretty good
example of using E-Prime for the sake of improving writing style.

"I was assaulted" is passive voice, also using the verb 'to be'. As you may
notice, the passive voice uses 'to be' very often, so eliminating 'to be'
would eliminate most cases of passive voice.

Languages like Russian and many others sort of do this: in present active
indicative you do not use 'to be' unless you are emphasizing it, so "Sasha is
a student" is literally "Sasha student". There is some linguistics term for it
but it's escaping me at the moment.

------
mynameishere
Hamlet:

I am chiefly concerned with the question of killing myself or not killing
myself.

EDIT. Oops, 2nd try:

A concern has arisen in my consciousness regarding the question of killing
myself or not killing myself.

...I'm trying to keep all the same implications that WS put into the phrase,
to hell with scansion.

~~~
sdurkin
To exist, or not to exist? That question occupies my thoughts.

~~~
whatusername
Existance, or oblivion? I ponder this.

------
gasull
I liked this article better than the one in Wikipedia:

<http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm>

------
nihilocrat
If you've read _The Watchmen_ , this is exactly how Rohrschach speaks
throughout the entire(?) book. It makes him sound like he's a walking, talking
news ticker or weather report.

------
tlrobinson
How would you translate "I think, therefore I am"?

"I think, therefore I exist"?

~~~
nostrademons
Descartes meant the latter, correct?

~~~
foulmouthboy
The former sounds much nicer.

------
wilkes
I miss R.A.W.

~~~
cjc
Robert Anton Wilson disliked the verb:

 _I suppose Joyce made Bloom such a tangled genetic and cultural mixture to
expose the absurdities of anti-semitism; but I also suspect that he wanted to
undermine that neurolinguistic habit which postmodernists call "essentialism"
and which Korzybski claimed invades our brains and causes hallucinations or
delusions every time we use the word "is."_

<http://rawilson.com/prethought.shtml>

(Scroll down approximately 1/4 of the page for the entry titled "Schrödinger's
Jew")

~~~
metachor
Before his death, Robert Anton Wilson taught several online courses at the
Maybe Logic Academy (<http://www.maybelogic.org>), which he founded. A large
component of these courses took place in online discussion forums, where RAW
encouraged the participants to use e-prime for all discussion.

At least one of the courses also included readings from Alfred Korzybski and
the General Semanticists, who played a large role in formulating the concept
and practice of e-prime.

Korzybski wrote a fascinating book called Science and Sanity: An Introduction
to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. In this work, Korzybski
postulates that the multi-millennium-old Aristotelian system of thinking
contributes a form of "essentialism" to the underlying metaphysical
assumptions of the Western linguistic and philosophic traditions ("things"
having "is-ness").

Korzybski argues that these metaphysical assumptions appear "false-to-facts"
with modern scientific understanding (i.e. an operational accounting inspired
by biological and physical systems thinking). These assumptions introduce
flawed and delusional reasoning when projected on to a linguistic domain, and
their operation on a human social system over time results in the emergence of
pathological behaviors in individuals' interactions.

Korzybski and others concluded that a step towards a more-sane system of
thinking might result in part from making explicit the flawed metaphysical
assumptions implicitly derived from Arestotelianism, and eleminating their
behavioral manifestation in speech (i.e. as forms of the verb "to be").

Science and Sanity can be previewed online at Google Books:

[http://books.google.com/books?id=KN5gvaDwrGcC&printsec=f...](http://books.google.com/books?id=KN5gvaDwrGcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=korzybski+non-
aristotelian#PPP1,M1)

Incidentally, the same RAW course which took readings from Korzybski also
included James Joyce's Ulyesses as a primary text.

------
jcromartie
In my opinion, E-Prime appears good for two things: dehumanizing English, and
making it hard to say really stupid things!

------
msg
He and I share salient properties, as you and he share salient properties, as
you and me share salient properties, and we form a cohesive unit. See how they
run like pigs from a gun, see how they fly. I cry.

E-Prime lacks metaphors, and robs fuzzy language of all its indeterminate
power.

------
Zak
I would love to force writers of academic papers to use this style. I believe
that the formal academic style removes the voice of the author from a work is
dishonest. I'd much rather see "I think X because..." than "X is because...".

------
decode
Does anyone know how to express progressive aspects in E-Prime?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_aspect#English>

------
tokenadult
This would do violence to Hamlet's soliloquy in Shakespeare's play.

