E-Prime (short for English-Prime) is a form of the English language from which the verb to be in all its forms is avoided by the writer or speaker. Thus, E-Prime does not contain the words "be", "is", "am", "are", "was", "were", "been" and "being", nor does it contain their contractions "'m", "'s", and "'re". E-Prime therefore re-phrases most statements which use the passive voice, thus encouraging writers and speakers to clearly state an action's agent.[1] E-Prime can be based on any dialect of English.
Some people use E-Prime as a mental discipline to filter speech and translate the speech of others.[2] For example, the sentence "the movie was good" could translate into E-Prime as "I liked the movie" or as "the movie made me laugh". The E-Prime versions communicate the speaker's experience rather than judgment, making it harder for the writer or reader to confuse opinion with fact.
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D. David Bourland, Jr. (1928–2000) proposed E-Prime as an addition to Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics some years after Korzybski's death in 1950. Bourland, who had studied under Korzybski, coined the term in a 1965 essay entitled A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime (originally published in the General Semantics Bulletin). The essay quickly generated controversy within the General Semantics field, partly because practitioners of General Semantics sometimes saw Bourland as attacking the verb 'to be' as such, and not just certain usages.
Bourland collected and published three volumes of essays in support of his innovation. The first (1991), co-edited by Paul Dennithorne Johnston bore the title: To Be or Not: An E-Prime Anthology [3] For the second, More E-Prime: To Be or Not II: 1994, Concord, California: International Society for General Semantics, he added a third editor, Jeremy Klein.
Bourland and Johnston edited a third book E-Prime III: a third anthology: 1997, Concord, California: International Society for General Semantics.
Korzybski (1879–1950) had determined that two forms of the verb 'to be'—the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication—had structural problems. For example, the sentence "The coat is red" has no observer, the sentence "We see the coat as red" (where "we" indicates observers) appears more specific in context as regards light waves and colour as determined by modern science, that is, colour results from a reaction in the human brain.
Korzybski pointed out the circularity of many dictionary definitions, and suggested adoption of the convention, then recently introduced among mathematicians, of acknowledging some minimal ensemble of terms as necessarily 'undefined'; he chose 'structure', 'order', and 'relation'. He wrote of those that they do not lend themselves to explication in words, but only by exhibiting how to use them in sentences.
Korzybski advocated raising one's awareness of structural issues generally through training in General Semantics.[citation needed]
In the English language, the verb 'to be' has several distinct functions:
Bourland sees specifically the "identity" and "predication" functions as pernicious, but advocates eliminating all forms for the sake of simplicity. In the case of the "existence" form (and less idiomatically, the "location" form), one might (for example) simply substitute the verb "exists". Other copula-substitutes in English include taste, feel, smell, sound, grow, remain, stay, and turn, among others which a user of E-prime might employ instead of to be.
Bourland and other advocates also suggest that use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of language that reduces the possibility for misunderstanding and for conflict.[4] Some languages already treat equivalents of the verb "to be" very differently without giving any obvious advantages to their speakers. For instance, Arabic, like Russian, already lacks a verb form of "to be" in the present tense. If one wanted to assert, in Arabic, that an apple looks red, one would not literally say "the apple is red", but "the apple red". In other words, speakers can communicate the verb form of "to be", with its semantic advantages and disadvantages, even without the existence of the word itself. Thus they do not as such resolve the ambiguities that E-Prime seeks to alleviate without an additional rule, such as that all sentences must contain a verb. Similarly, the Ainu language consistently does not distinguish between "be" and "become"; thus ne means both "be" and "become", and pirka means "good", "be good", and "become good" equally. Many languages—for instance Japanese, Spanish, and Hebrew—already distinguish "existence"/"location" from "identity"/"predication".
E-Prime and Charles Kay Ogden's Basic English may lack compatibility because Basic English has a closed set of verbs, excluding verbs such as "become", "remain", and "equal" that E-Prime often uses to describe precise actions or states.
Changes such as those proposed for E-Prime also might eliminate enough ways to express aspect in African American Vernacular English to prove unworkable if applied indiscriminately and pedantically to such language.
Alfred Korzybski criticized the use of the verb "to be", and stated that "any proposition containing the word 'is' [or its other conjugations 'are,' be' etc] creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies"[5] However, he also justified the expression he coined — "the map is not the territory" — by saying that "the denial of identification (as in 'is not') has opposite neuro-linguistic effects on the brain from the assertion of identity (as in 'is')." Noam Chomsky, "[r]egarded as the father of modern linguistics",[6] commented on Korzybski's "insight":
Sometimes what we say can be misleading, sometimes not, depending on whether we are careful. If there's anything else [in Korzybski's work], I don't see it. That was the conclusion of my undergrad papers 60 years ago. Reading Korzybski extensively, I couldn't find anything that was not either trivial or false. As for neuro-linguistic effects on the brain, nothing was known when he wrote and very little of that is relevant now.[citation needed]
To be belongs to the set of irregular verbs in English; some individuals, especially those who have learned English as a second language, may have difficulty recognizing all its forms. In addition, speakers of colloquial English frequently contract forms of to be after pronouns or before the word not. E-Prime would prohibit the following words as forms of to be:
E-prime does not prohibit the following words, because they do not derive from forms of to be. Some of these serve similar grammatical functions (see auxiliary verbs).
The following short examples illustrate some of the ways that standard English writing can be modified to use E-Prime.
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| To be or not to be, That is the question.
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To exist or not to exist, I ask this question.
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| Roses are red; Violets are blue. Honey is sweet, And so are you. |
Roses look red; Violets look blue. Honey tastes sweet, As sweet as you. |
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| 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?' | Alice had just begun 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 has a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversation?'
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An expanded and explicated example: '[...] if you saw a man, reeking of whisky, stagger down the street and then collapse, you might think (in ordinary English) "He is drunk." In E-Prime one would think instead "He acts drunk," or "He looks drunk," both of which statements obviously coming closer to an accurate description of the actual experience, and involving fewer covert assumptions than the English original.'[8]
In the original verse (Roses are red / Violets are blue / Honey is sweet / And so are you) 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". E-Prime seeks to avoid this type of thinking and writing.
An E-Prime translation attempting to preserve the literal meaning of the original might read:
The following example sacrifices the metaphor implied in line 4 of the original ("You are honey-sweet") to preserve one literal meaning of line 3, namely that honey tastes sweet, and therefore replaces line 4 with simile meaning something close to the original: "honey tastes sweet, and something of your nature makes you as sweet as that."
This example assumes the speaker does not mean the addressee of the poem "tastes sweet," but does mean something like "I find you sweet as honey," and attempts to preserve the meter and rhyme of the original while still avoiding any form of the verb "to be."
In an attempt to subtract the assumption of absolutes ("what is") in the original, and to illustrate thought and perspective more in the spirit of E-Prime, the following translation attempts to state meaning directly from a hypothetical speaker's personal feelings toward the addressee, and express that meaning through the filter of that speaker's perceptions of the natural world. Therefore, the translation below changes the meaning of the poem.
That version attempted to say something close to "I perceive the natural world in the way most people do. (Few people would dispute that the most common rose-variety seems red to the human eye, or that violets can appear blue.) Therefore, when I tell you I like honey, I tell you I like a thing most would agree tastes sweet and may also perceive as a pleasing thing in other ways. Therefore by claiming to like honey and to like you, I claim to make that statement with a certainty as absolute as human perception allows."
The usefulness of E-Prime in eliminating prejudice and improving readability, as well as the restrictions it imposes on language, has been questioned by many authors (Lakoff, 1992; Cullen, 1992; Parkinson, 1992; Kenyon, 1992; French, 1992, 1993; Lohrey, 1993). These authors observed that a communication under the copula ban can still be extremely unclear and imply prejudice, while losing important speech patterns, such as identities and identification. James D. French, a computer programmer at the University of California, Berkeley, summarized ten arguments against E-Prime (in the context of General Semantics) as follows[9]:
According to an article (written in E-Prime and advocating a role for E-Prime in ESL and EFL programs) published by the Office of English Language Programs of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in the State Department of the United States, "Requiring students to avoid the verb to be on every assignment would deter students from developing other fundamental skills of fluent writing."[10]
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Coined by its inventor, D David Bourland, Jr. (1928-2000).
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Singular |
Plural |
E-Prime
   | E-prime: The Spirit and the Letter, by Ralph E. Kenyon Jr. - E-prime: The Spirit and the Letter by Ralph Kenyon |
| | E-Prime and Linguistic Revision, by C. A. Hilgartner - Users of the E-Prime dialect of English decline to use any form of to be, on the grounds that they expect to derive advantages form following this constraint. Among these, the lists include the loss (rejection) of passive voice. When I use E-Prime, I mus |
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