131–140 of 157 posts
How 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 Maybe: "One calls her/him"?
Sounds 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 cl…
The 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 )
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Doesn't the part parenthesised in commas have a kind of implicit 'is'? The part between the commas, I think, is called a subjunctive clause. Does it really break the "rules" of E'? The sentence still contains a verb, so it doesn't look like a loop-hole to me.
Loop holes don't break rules - by definition.
Shakespeare would not have appreciated this. How do you say "to be or not to be" in EPrime?
To live or to die,
I ask myself this.Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm named|called Steven It is perfectly normal to use phrasing such as that in some languages apart from English. While not common in English, I think generally it makes more sense this way.
The point was that those are forbidden in E-prime, (they have "am" in them).
I meant instead "I call myself ______ ", which is common in Spanish, for example, and other languages.
21st Century language geeks think that English should be more like Klingon, so they ban the verb "to be".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How 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…
Borrowed from Spanish and similar languages: - They call me Steven. Probably it sounds wrong for native English speakers.
It's the sort of phrase that James Bond might say.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly what I thought when I read the article. The proponents wanted to ban a class of semantics but instead chose to ban a relevant but totally different class of syntax . (can't help rewriting to follow the style)
I have trouble imagining how to answer "What's E-Prime; I've never heard of it." without using the semantics of "to be". And answering that seems to me the primary goal of an encyclopedic article. If the article starts with "E-Prime prescribes..." I still don't know what E-Prime _is_. Is it a committee? Is it a style guide? (Right now the article says it's a version of English, which, if superficially, at least answe…
I 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 "Pl…
change: reintroduce the word "is" to the opening sentence, for clarity; fix sentence where a "speaker" becomes a "writer"