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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'

#71

Post by untothebreach »

pmontra wrote: post #10
legulere wrote: post #6

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"?

AFAIK Russian, which lost the present tense of "to be", just says "my name X" (Меня зовут X). Italian, which has the verb to be, nevertheless uses a different form: literally "I call me X" (mi chiamo X). "I'm X" (io sono X) would be understood but it's more the answer to who are you than to what's your name.

Spanish, as well: "Te llamas $NAME" = "You call yourself $NAME", "Me llamo $NAME" = "I call myself $NAME"

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

#73

Post by shdon »

chippy wrote: post #29

I have spent an entire week writing everything in E-prime. All texts, all IRC chats, all postings, every email. I also spent the following week trying to speak in E-Prime. This proved very difficult but worth it. I had a notepad with me with several useful phrases in it. Even simple things like ordering from a coffee shop made me stumble. But I would try my best to speak in E-prime. I failed several times! Writing ap…

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 an advantage over "more subjective" for a hacker?
And let me ask that example question as well. As somebody working in IT, I strive to come across as (nay, to be!) as objective and as precise as possible.

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

#75

Post by peteretep »

geomark wrote: post #42
peteretep wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a tangent, Thai lacks "yes" and "no", and in theory one signals assent by repeating the verb or adjective, with or without a negative modifier. "Hungry, or?" - "Not hungry" "Take, no?" - "Take" In practice, people will often grunt for yes, and shake their head and break eye contact for no.

"Yes" is ใช่่ , romanized as chai [1] "No" is ไม่ , ไม่ใช่ , or เปล่า (mai, mai chai, bplao) There are many other words that also mean yes/no but those are the direct translations that are used extensively in everyday conversation. [1] http://www.thai2english.com/dictionary/yes.html [2] http://www.thai2english.com/dictionary/no.html

You clearly speak to different Thai people than me day to day. I have only heard them used to mark pieces of information as being correct or incorrect.

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

#76

Post by ashmud »

This reminds me of how most people seem to use "hopefully." I very seldom hear people say "I hope this works." Instead, almost every time I hear, "hopefully, this works." It seems to have a "language smell" of wanting a way to weasel out making a commitment to a particular stance or viewpoint.

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

#77

Post by usefulcat »

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'.

Makes the first sentence an even better summary, IMO.

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

#78

Post by bediger4000 »

E-Prime has two very practical uses:

1. Code documentation. If you write your comments and docs in E-Prime, you will find it a little more difficult to write ambiguous docs. In comments, E-Prime helps you avoid using "is" to describe a variable's contents and type with the same phrasing, which can confuse later readers.

2. ET speech in Sci-Fi movies or Tee Vee shows. If you write, say, a Vulcan's lines in E-Prime, you almost always end up with a slightly foreign, or "scientific" sounding prose.

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

#79

Post by theOnliest »

Do we also lose the progressive tense, then? How would one express something like "The car ran me over while I was walking to the store?"

I suppose "The car ran me over while walking to the store," but that's ambiguous, since some sort of walking car could have run me over, when I happened to be sitting on a bench outside the store.

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