E-Prime

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E-Prime called the project a change in the English vocabulary, so that all forms of the verb "to be" ( be ) be avoided: am, are, is, was, were, been and being, as well as their contractions, such as "it's" and in". Among other things, this restriction excludes the use of the passive voice, which means that the author or speaker must clearly name the person involved, the agent or the decision-maker. According to proponents, it forces the writer or speaker to think differently. The result is a language that most people find easier to read.

Some refer to E-Prime as a variant of the English language, while others see it as a mental discipline to filter their own speech and translate speech from others. For example, the grammatical construct “The movie was good.” (The film was good.) Changes to “I liked the movie.” (I liked the film.). Telling someone "the film was good" implies the goodness of the film instead of telling someone about the subjective experience of the film. The use of E-Prime makes it difficult for writers and readers to confuse the writer's opinion with a certain fact.

history

D. David Bourland, Jr. (1928–2000) proposed E-Prime in addition to Alfred Korzybski's general semantics a few years after Korzybski's death (1950). Bourland, who studied under Korzybski, coined the term in 1965 in the article A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime (originally published in General Semantics Bulletin ). This quickly became controversial within general semantics, in part because some proponents of general semantics saw Bourland as an attack on the verb "to be" as such, rather than on certain uses of the verb.

He collected and published three volumes of articles in support of his idea. The first was entitled: To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology: 1991, San Francisco: International Society for General Semantics, edited by D. David Bourland, Jr. and Paul Dennithorne Johnston . The second: More E-Prime: To Be or Not II: 1994, Concord, California: International Society for General Semantics . Bourland and Johnston published a third book, E-Prime III: a third anthology: 1997, Concord, California: International Society for General Semantics .

Korzybski (1879–1950) had decided that the two forms of the verb "to be" - the "is" of identity and the "is" of the statement - have structural problems. For example, the phrase “The coat is red.” Has no observer. The phrase “We see the coat as red.”, In which “we” is the observer, appears more specific in the context of colors, as is also established by modern science Color perception results from a reaction in the human brain.

Korzybski underlined the circularity of many dictionary definitions. He suggested adopting the convention, describing among mathematicians the allowance of a minimal set of expressions as necessarily "undefined"; he chose " structure ", " order " and " relation ".

Korzybski recommended raising awareness of structural values ​​simply by training general semantics.

Different functions of "to be"

In the English language , the verb "to be" has some distinct functions:

  • Identity , the form " noun copula noun " [The cat is an animal] (the cat is an animal)
  • Statement of the form " noun copula adjective " [The cat is furry] (the cat is hairy)
  • Helper , of the form " noun copula verb " [The cat is sleeping]; [The cat is bitten by the dog] (the cat is sleeping); (The cat is bitten by the dog)
  • Exist , of the form " copula noun " [There is a cat] (there is a cat)
  • Position , the form " noun copula place " [The cat is on the mat] (the cat is on the mat)

Bourland considers the functions “identity” and “statement” to be particularly harmful, but suggests avoiding all forms for the sake of simplicity.

Basic principle

E-Prime forces a writer to choose verbs carefully: omitting “to be” implicitly eliminates the passive and progressive tense . Some verbs like "can" use paraphrases in certain tenses and moods that include "to be". This demarcation alone makes a lot for proponents in the style of E-Prime, since many stylists recognize such constructs too often in English fonts. Of course, it can also cause a lot of difficulties in learning to use E-Prime.

Bourland and other proponents suggest that the use of e-prime leads to a less dogmatic type of language and reduces the possibility of misunderstanding and conflict. Note that some languages ​​treat equivalents of “to be” differently without giving their speakers any obvious advantage. For example, there is already a lack of verb forms of “to be” in the present tense in the Arabic and Russian languages . If you wanted to explain in Arabic that an apple looks red, you would not literally say "the apple is red", but rather "the apple is red". This means that speakers can communicate with a verb of the type “to be”, with its semantic advantages and disadvantages, without the word itself having to exist. In this way they do not resolve the ambiguities that E-Prime tries to avoid without an additional rule such as that all sentences must contain a verb. Similarly, Ainu does not differentiate between “to be” and “to become”; ne means both “to be” and “will” and pirka means “good”, “to be good” and “to be good”. Many languages, such as Japanese, Spanish and Hebrew, distinguish existence / place from identity / statement.

There is a lack of compatibility between E-Prime and Charles Kay Ogden's Basic English : Basic English has a fixed set of words which, for example, does not contain the verbs “to become”, “to remain” and “to equal”. In E-Prime, on the other hand, these verbs can easily be used to describe exact states of being. E-Prime only excludes forms of "sein", while Basic English includes "to be".

Furthermore, changes such as those proposed by E-Prime could eliminate enough ways to express aspects in African-American English that if the changes were applied indiscriminately and pedantically, the language could no longer be used properly.

Alfred Korzybski criticized the use of the verb “to be” because “any statement that contains the word 'is' [or its related words 'are', 'be', etc.] causes structural confusion which ultimately leads to birth help in serious errors ”. Noam Chomsky , considered the father of modern linguistics, commented on Korzybski's criticism of his change of mind:

“Sometimes what we say can be misleading, and sometimes not, depending on what we're looking for. If there is anything else [in Korzybski's work], I don't see it. That was the conclusion of my work as a student 60 years ago. Reading Korzybski extensively, I couldn't find anything that wasn't either trivial or false. As for the neuro-linguistic effects of the brain, nothing was known when he wrote this, and very, very little of what is relevant now. "

Shapes to Avoid

"To be" belongs to the set of irregular verbs in English ; some, especially those who have learned English as a foreign language, may have difficulty recognizing all of its forms. In addition, in colloquial English, “to be” is often added to pronouns or before the word “not”. E-Prime prohibits the following words as forms of "to be":

  • be
  • being
  • been
  • at the
  • is; isn't
  • are; aren't
  • What; wasn't
  • were; weren't
  • Contractions formed from pronouns and a conjugation of "to be":
    • In the
    • you're; we're; they're
    • he's; she's; it's
    • there's; here's
    • where's; how's; what's; who's
  • E-Prime also prohibits the concatenation of "to be" in the non-standardized dialects of English, such as:
    • ain't
    • hain't (if "ain't" instead of "haven't" derived)

Allowed words

E-Prime does not prohibit the following words because they are not derived from "to be". Some serve as similar grammatical functions (see auxiliary verb ).

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

Allowed words with forbidden homophones or homographs

The following words can appear as either homograph or homophone as a form of "to be", but they do not have the same meaning.

  • its, the possessive gender-neutral pronoun "it" in the singular
  • Contractions of the form "'s", derived from "has"
  • “Hain't”, in non-standardized dialects, when it is derived from “haven't” but not from “ain't”

Examples

These short examples are intended to show some ways in which common English sentences can be expressed in E-Prime.

ordinary English E-Prime
To be or not to be,
That is the question.
- Shakespeare , Hamlet
 To live or not to live.
That I must answer.
Roses are red;
Violets are blue.
Honey is sweet,
and so are you. 		Roses appear red;
Violets seem blue.
Honey tastes sweet,
And you elicit love.
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 , Alice in Wonderland
 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? '

Literal and analogous translation by E-Prime

In the original verse (Roses are red / ...) the speaker expresses a belief in absolutes: "Just as it is true that roses are red and violets are blue, it is true that you are as sweet as honey". But E-Prime tries to avoid that way of thinking and writing.

First example of literal translation

An E-Prime translation that tries to preserve the literal meaning of the original could read:

Roses look red;
Violets look blue.
Honey pleases me,
And so do you.

Second example of literal translation

The following example removes the metaphor alluded to on line four of the original (“you are sweet as honey”) to keep line three literally meaning that honey tastes sweet. Consequently, a similar phrase is used on line four: "Honey tastes sweet, and something of your character makes you as sweet as honey." This example assumes that the speaker does not mean the recipient of the poem tastes sweet ("tastes sweet") but what he thinks the recipient is sweet as honey. The aim is to maintain the metrics and the rhythm of the original and avoid forms of "to be".

Roses look red;
Violets look blue.
Honey tastes sweet,
As sweet as you.

An example of translation in the sense of E-Prime

In an attempt to subtract the takeover of ("what is") from the original and to present thoughts and perspectives in the sense of E-Prime, the following translation attempts to explain the meaning directly from the feelings of a hypothetical speaker to the recipient and Explain meaning through the speaker's perception of the world. Therefore, the following translation changes the meaning of the poem.

Roses seem red;
Violets seem blue.
I like honey,
and I like you.

This version tries to say something like, "I suppose the natural world was the way most people do. (Hardly anyone would deny that most rose varieties appear red to the human eye, or that violets can appear blue). When I say I like honey, I am telling you that I like one thing that tastes mostly sweet and that is perceived as pleasant in another way. By claiming to like honey and to like you, I claim to make this statement with the certainty that human perception allows. "

literature

  • D. David Bourland, Jr., Paul Dennithorne Johnstone: To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology . International Society for General Semantics, San Francisco 1991, ISBN 978-0-918970-38-1
  • D. David Bourland, Jr., Paul Dennithorne Johnstone: E-Prime III: a third anthology . International Society for General Semantics, Concord CA 1997, ISBN 978-0-918970-46-6
  • D. David Bourland, Jr., Jeremy Klein, Paul Dennithorne Johnstone: More E-Prime: To Be or Not II . International Society for General Semantics, Concord CA 1994, ISBN 978-0-918970-40-4
  • James D. French: The Top Ten Arguments against E-Prime. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, v49n2, 1992, pp.175-179
  • James D. French: The Prime Problem with General Semantics. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, v50n3, 1993, pp.326-335

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Example: Bourland's Article on the Basics
  2. ↑ its in the Wiktionary (English language)