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E-Prime: English without the verb 'to be'

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Re: E-Prime: English without the verb 'to be'

#151

Post by conceit »

chrisseaton wrote: post #52
re wrote: post #14

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…

Actually the first sentence shows a loop-hole doesn't it? > E-Prime, a prescriptive version of the English language, excludes all forms of the verb to be. Doesn't the part parenthesised in commas have a kind of implicit 'is'? For example E' is supposed to stop me saying things like 'Terminator is a good film and is 2 hours long', but I can say 'Terminator, a good film, lasts for 2 hours'.

Read it as an indefinite enumeration: read the first comma as an inclusive and, then ignore the second comma.

> stop me saying things like 'Terminator is a good film and is 2 hours long'

can't you say

>x is y and z,

do you need the second is?

> E-Prime uses the English language prescriptively.

there, now even the prescription is mentioned in a prescription. How recursive, init?

Re: E-Prime: English without the verb 'to be'

#152

Post by conceit »

jdmichal wrote: post #83
chrisseaton wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the first sentence shows a loop-hole doesn't it? > E-Prime, a prescriptive version of the English language, excludes all forms of the verb to be. Doesn't the part parenthesised in commas have a kind of implicit 'is'? For example E' is supposed to stop me saying things like 'Terminator is a good film and is 2 hours long', but I can say 'Terminator, a good film, lasts for 2 hours'.

It does. Specifically, it is carrying an implicit "which is": > E-Prime, [which is] a prescriptive version of the English language, ... That sentence should instead be written: > E-Prime prescribes a version of the English language which excludes all forms of the verb "to be".

s/prescribes/is

Prescribe seems out of place there, anyhow.

Re: E-Prime: English without the verb 'to be'

#153

Post by euyyn »

obsurveyor wrote: post #142
euyyn wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your original question is invalid because the questioner would never ask it if they only used E-Prime. Let's re-phrase your question with E-Prime: "Describe E-Prime to me, I've never heard of it." You get the idea now? The very form of the question affects your understanding of the answer. Through the description you receive, you begin to understand what E-Prime means to those that came up with it. In E-Prime, you li…

The questioner cannot use E-Prime because he doesn't know what E-Prime is. And before being interested in its description, he'll probably want to know what it is (is it a law? is it a game? is it a style guide? a brain training exercise? is it a dog?).

See, "E-Prime" is a proper noun, and proper nouns don't have a meaning; they instead refer to specific things (giving them an identity). The same way Spain is a country, E-Prime is "a variant of English."

Re: E-Prime: English without the verb 'to be'

#154

Post by dTal »

d4nt wrote: post #44

Having read 1984, I find the desire to remove undesirable language from our vocabulary quite unnerving. I realise it has the best of intentions, and nobody is proposing to remove 'to be' from everything. But the discussion here about how adopting E-Prime forces you to rethink what you mean to say, is eerily reminiscent of how Newspeak was used to control people's thought process.

Perhaps this will help:

All language shapes thought. This is the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis".

"Newspeak" was an attempt to use this principle to shut down thought by taboo-ing entire classes of concept.

E-prime is an attempt to provoke thought by taboo-ing a single concept.

There are good and bad uses for everything.

Re: E-Prime: English without the verb 'to be'

#155

Post by jdmichal »

conceit wrote: post #152
jdmichal wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. Specifically, it is carrying an implicit "which is": > E-Prime, [which is] a prescriptive version of the English language, ... That sentence should instead be written: > E-Prime prescribes a version of the English language which excludes all forms of the verb "to be".

s/prescribes/is Prescribe seems out of place there, anyhow.

Prescribe is a linguistic jargon. [0] It is exactly the correct word. And the whole point of E' is to remove is in such cases, because it carries an overloaded value which could change from person to person. In this case, a linguist would likely understand that it is prescribing a form of English, but not everyone would share that interpretation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription

Re: E-Prime: English without the verb 'to be'

#156

Post by [deleted] »

conceit wrote: post #152
jdmichal wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. Specifically, it is carrying an implicit "which is": > E-Prime, [which is] a prescriptive version of the English language, ... That sentence should instead be written: > E-Prime prescribes a version of the English language which excludes all forms of the verb "to be".

s/prescribes/is Prescribe seems out of place there, anyhow.

[deleted]

Re: E-Prime: English without the verb 'to be'

#157

Post by conceit »

jdmichal wrote: post #155
conceit wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/prescribes/is Prescribe seems out of place there, anyhow.

Prescribe is a linguistic jargon. [0] It is exactly the correct word. And the whole point of E' is to remove is in such cases, because it carries an overloaded value which could change from person to person. In this case, a linguist would likely understand that it is prescribing a form of English, but not everyone would share that interpretation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription

He, my bad then. English is very contextual. Point in case, prescriptive could also mean a speaker of E' must speak prescriptive. As foreign speaker, i then figured it means descriptive, which would've made some sort of sense to me, but is actually the opposite in linguistic terms.

Now I get down into semantics, can E-Prime prescribe something or is it the name of a rule-set that can be prescribed? I lean to the latter, hence my remark is still valid?

On another note, I find the recursion mentioned by OP quite interesting in a broader context. Choice of grammar has meaning itself.

Edit: Ultimately though, language is inherently underspecified, I heard, and I suppose in linguistic context it means a lack of definite distinction. You could go on subdividing prescription into negative and positive, i.e. prohibitive and, say, constructive. You could divide that ad infinitum. No?

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