E-Prime

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For the interactive-experiment design software, see E-Prime (software)

E-Prime, short for English Prime, refers to a modification of the English language that prohibits the use of the verb "to be" in all its forms.

History

One of Korzybski's students, D. David Bourland, Jr. proposed E-prime as an addition to Alfred Korzybski's general semantics some years after Korzybski's death in 1950. Bourland coined the term in an essay in 1965 entitled A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime (originally published in the General Semantics Bulletin). It quickly became controversial within general semantics, partly because sometimes practioners of General Semantics saw Bourland as attacking the verb 'to be' as such, and not just certain usages — one cartoon in an E-Prime book compared the verb with excrement.

Korzybski had found two forms of the verb 'to be' - the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication - to have structural problems. For example, the sentence "The coat is red" has no observer, but "We see the coat as red" (here "we" indicates observers) appears more correct as to the facts about light waves and colour as determined by modern science, i.e., colour results from a reaction in the human brain. Korzybski advocated raising one's awareness of structural issues generally through training in general semantics.

The different functions of 'to be'

In use, the verb 'to be' has several distinct functions:

  • 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]; [The cat is bitten by the dog]
  • 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" functions 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".

Criticism

Note that E-Prime forces a writer to choose verbs and meanings carefully: the elimination of "to be" implicitly eliminates the passive voice and progressive aspect. Since many stylists argue that these occur too frequently in sloppy English writing, this constraint alone accounts for much of the appeal of E-Prime to some of its advocates. Of course it may also generate difficulties for some writers as they learn to use E-Prime.

E-Prime's advocates may also assert that its use leads to a less dogmatic style of language that reduces the possibility for misunderstanding and for conflict. Detractors might observe that some languages already treat equivalents of the verb "to be" 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", one would not literally say "the apple looks red", but "the apple red". That is, speakers can communicate the verb form of "to be" - and/or its E-Prime equivalents - with their semantic advantages and disadvantages, even without the existence of the word itself (though without resolving the ambiguities that E-Prime seeks to alleviate). 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, Spanish, and Hebrew — already distinguish "existence"/"location" from "identity"/"predication".

No compatibility exists between E-Prime and Charles Kay Ogden's Basic English because Basic English has a closed set of verbs - excluding verbs such as "become", "remain", and "equal" that E-Prime uses to replace or precisify states of "being". Changes such as those proposed for E-Prime also might eliminate enough ways to express aspect in African American Vernacular English to prove unworkable if applied indiscriminately to such language.

Discouraged forms

To be falls in the set of irregular verbs in English; some individuals, especially those have learned English as a second language, may have difficulty recognizing all its forms. In addition, speakers of colloquial English frequently contract to be after pronouns or before the word not. E-Prime would prohibit the following words as forms of to be:

  • be
  • being
  • been
  • am
  • is; isn't
  • are; aren't
  • was; wasn't
  • were; weren't
  • Contractions formed from a pronoun and a conjugation of to be:
    • I'm
    • you're; we're; they're
    • he's; she's; it's (when derived from it is)
  • E-Prime likewise prohibits contractions of to be found in nonstandard dialects of English, such as the following:
    • ain't
    • hain't (when derived from ain't rather than haven't)

Allowed words

E-prime does not prohibit the following words, because they do not derive from forms of to be. Some of these serve similar grammatical functions (see auxiliary verbs).

  • become
  • has; have
  • I've; you've
  • do; does; doing; did
  • can; could
  • will; would
  • shall; should
  • ought

Allowed words with prohibited homophones or homographs

The following words may either look (homograph) or sound (homophone) like a form of the word to be, but they do not have the same meaning.

  • its, the possessive case of the singular gender-neutral pronoun
  • it's and more generally ’s when derived from 'has'
  • hain't (in nonstandard dialects when derived from haven't rather than ain't)
  • Nouns that sound like forms of the verb to be:
    • bee, meaning an insect or a contest
    • being when used as a noun, as in Virginia Woolf's statement, "The artist after all is a solitary being"
    • B, M, and R, names of the letters (although M is pronounced distinctly from am in many dialects)

Examples

E-Prime Standard English
These short examples illustrate some of the ways to modify standard English writing 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.
Roses look red;
Violets look blue.
Honey pleases me,
And so do you. 		Roses are red;
Violets are blue.
Honey is sweet,
And so are you.
Alice began to tire 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 read, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what use does a book have,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'
—modified from 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

See also

External links

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