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]."<p>For a similar example, the "Plot Summary" section of the page about "A Void" also conforms to its subject's constraint--in that case, avoiding the letter "e": <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void#Plot_summary" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void#Plot_summary</a><p>It surprises me that avoiding forms of "to be" presents such a challenge for me--particularly with this sentence. I feel that it makes my writing sound more repetitive, since I end up replacing "X is" with wordy alternatives like "I find X" or "X seems"; while I'm used to forms of "to be" appearing dozens of times in a paragraph, my replacements stand out more when overused.
I have spent an entire week writing everything in E-prime. All texts, all IRC chats, all postings, every email.<p>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!<p>Writing appeared much much easier. It made emails and other postings less personal, less objective and more subjective and relative. I believe "Non Violent Communication" has many similarities to E-Prime.<p>Robert Anton Wilson wrote a very good introductory text explaining E-Prime. <a href="http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm</a> I suggest you all check it out!
The argument for forbidding "to be" seems a little like the argument for forbidding "is a" (inheritance) relationships in programming: that any "is a" can be expressed more precisely as a "has a" and/or "does _".<p>I think it's interesting to take the argument even further, to argue for structural types (like interfaces in Go and Typescript, and objects in OCaml) over nominal types (like Java interfaces and Haskell typeclasses). The former just says "if Bar is an interface with method Blaz(int, int, bool), and Foo has a method Blaz(int, int, bool), then Foo is a Bar", while the latter require the programmer to explicitly specify that Foo is a (implements) bar.
Sometimes I use E-Prime as sort of a verbose flag for English.<p>Instead of: "Mount Everest is almost 8 km tall."<p>A verbose E-Prime version would sound something like: "I recall having read an Wikipedia article that reported the height of Mount Everest as almost 8 km."<p>Notice all the extra verbs in there.<p>"Recall"? Could I have mis-recalled?<p>"Read"? Could I have misread?<p>"Reported"? Could Wikipedia have misreported it, intentionally or unintentionally?
E-Prime has two very practical uses:<p>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.<p>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.
This <i>is</i> an interesting version of the English language.
It <i>is</i> clarifying thinking and strengthening writing.<p>Or should I say:
I find this version of the English language interesting. It clarifies my thinking and strengthens my writing.
Having read 1984, I find the desire to remove undesirable language from our vocabulary quite unnerving.<p>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.
When I was in high school my mom (a marriage and family therapist) cajoled me into using something like E-Prime. I had to be really careful when making generalizations around her, and the big no-no was to say that something or someone "made me feel" a certain way. It was infuriating at the time but it certainly made me take responsibility for own my feelings and opinions. This experience probably influenced my decision to major in linguistics.
The Turkish language has no "to be" verb at all. In addition, Turkish has an extra verb tense not present in other languages which distinguishes between things that the speaker has observed directly from those they are only relaying 2nd hand.
I find this article really interesting. I am a native speaker of Spanish and the verb 'to be' is usually one of the first lessons we learn when we study English.<p>Spanish has to different verbs to depict the meaning(s) of 'to be' -> ser (exist) and estar (stay). I always thought merging those meanings into a single verb did not help to express the richness of the English language.
17th Century language geeks thought that English should be more like Latin, so they banned split infinitives.<p>21st Century language geeks think that English should be more like Klingon, so they ban the verb "to be".
Chinese uses "is" much more rarely than english.
And that's something it takes a while to get used to.<p>For example 中國很大 ("China is very big", literally "China very big")<p>But for a while you'll be tempted to add an "is" in there.<p>In fact you can use an "is" to change the emphasis.<p>Eg. "中國是很大的" (literally "China is very big <i>adjective modifier</i>")
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:<p><a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hight#English" rel="nofollow">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hight#English</a><p>Maybe: "One calls her/him"?
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?"<p>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.
In High School, my English teacher had us write essays in a format that incorporated E-Prime, but I had no idea that it was actually called "E-Prime". In addition to not using forms of "to be," we followed the SEXI format. This meant that every body paragraph was composed of four parts: Statement, Explanation, eXample, and Interpretation (one web site lists this as Importance). I think that in short essays each SEXI paragraph also had to be four sentences long.<p>The combination of E-Prime and SEXI was a real challenge to write at first, but with practice I found that it led to really solid papers with greater clarity of thought. It was a tremendous help in writing my college senior thesis.<p>Unlike the article, I didn't try to use either form in my comment. :)
I haven't read the paper/books but from the wiki article I find it problematic that "the code is red" is replaced with "we see the coat as red". Specifically if I were forced to use E' it would be very hard to argue certain philosophical positions. Objectivism vs. Subjectivism for example or to return to the coat...there could be a philosophical difference between the redness of the coat and the perception of it and not everyone wants to bundle those.
Due to this reason I find it rather curious that identity was picked as one of the troublesome uses. Identity seems like one of the most important uses of is for me.<p>Without thinking about it too deeply, formal logic would probably also be rather funky.
I bemoan rather than beatify prescriptionists who bequeath their own bespoke English upon the world, befuddled when the rest of us find it somewhere between <i>befouling</i> and <i>beleaguering</i> rather than bewitching. Belike I belabor the point; I can begrudgingly believe avoiding "to be" might bestow a little clarity, sometimes. But betwixt you and I, in excess it bewilders me.
Sounds more like a statistical misattribution to me.<p>1. Many unclear English sentences have "to be".<p>2. Therefore, let's disallow "to be" to make English clearer.<p>Well, the obvious alternate explanation is:<p>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".<p>I mean, in what way is "Mars is round" any less clear/objective/interesting than "Mars orbits around the sun"?
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.
I have noticed an interesting effect where initially one is given the freedom to use all tools available to achieve a task, and over time restricted to an increasingly smaller subset. I find that this makes me optimize the process and in case of writing computer code, makes for easier to understand and more stable building blocks.
This helps achieve the objective in general semantics of 'silence on the objective level.' In other words, that none of us have access to reality unfiltered by our senses and our linguistic programs, so it is best to not make statements that assume we do.
As evidenced by some of these HN comments, E-prime encourages a voodoo-like approach to writing, in which you can magically make bad writing better just by doing a search-and-replace on a few words.