E-Prime (short for English-Prime, sometimes denoted E′) is a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be. E-Prime does not allow conjugations of to be (am, are, is, was, were, be, been, being), archaic forms (e.g. art, wast, wert), or contractions ('s, 'm, 're).
Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing.[1] For example, the sentence "the film was good" could translate into E-Prime as "I liked the film" or as "the film 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 [2] 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.
In the English language, the verb 'to be' (also known as the copula) 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 a user of E-prime might use 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 of misunderstanding and for conflict.[3] Some languages already treat equivalents of the verb "to be" differently without obvious benefits to their speakers. For instance, Arabic, like Russian, 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 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.
Alfred Korzybski criticized the use of the verb "to be", and stated that, "Any proposition containing the word 'is' [or its other forms 'are,' 'be', etc.] creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies."[4] 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",[5] commented on Korzybski's view:
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.
Rewilding-advocate Urban Scout wrote his book "Rewild or Die"[6] entirely in E-Prime. He states the rationale for this as follows:
“To be” prevents us from experiencing a shared reality; something we need in order to communicate in a sane way. If someone sees something completely different than another, our language prevents us from acknowledging the other's point of view by limiting our perception to fixed states. For example, if I say “Star Wars is a shitty movie,” and my friend says, “Star Wars is not a shitty movie!” We have no shared reality, for in our language, truth lies in only one of our statements and we can forever argue these truths until one of us writes a book and has more authority than the other. If on the other hand I say, “I hated Star Wars,” I state my opinion as observed through my own senses. I state a more accurate reality by not claiming that Star Wars “is” anything, as it could “be” anything to anyone.
Because they expose more assumptions, E-Prime statements may often invite challenge more readily than those made using the verb "to be". This is desirable according to philosopher John Ralston Saul who claims that a state of "permanent psychological discomfort"[7] can serve as a prerequisite to, or even as equivalent to, consciousness itself.
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).
Scholars of general semantics emphasize distinctions between different perceptions at different points in space (called "space-binding") over any universal God's eye view or assumed-shared or collective identity. By encouraging clarity on the active subject that "does" or wants or believes something, and disallowing passive constructions about the state of affairs (a common use of "to be"), E-Prime makes it more difficult to hide assumptions in statements about The Other or equivalent constructions such as "they" or "most people" or "the public" or "the taxpayer". E-Prime disallows forms of statement such as "they say X is Y" or "most people are into Z" or "the taxpayer is angry" while allowing statements such as "a clear majority of people say X always coexists with Y" or "most people approve of Z" or "the taxpayer doesn't like measure Q" or "lots of taxpayers express anger about Q".
E-Prime also discourages broad assertions crossing boundaries between past, present and future. General semantics' view of "time-binding" and modern theories of scenario analysis and financial risk (based on statistics) emphasize a need to keep time frames of measurement and analysis carefully aligned. This avoids confusion between past events (which cannot be changed), the present (which one can test but not generally change) and future events (which one still has time to change even on a large scale), which can prevent noticing or taking an action to improve a future outcome.
Replacing statements including "to be" with those using becomes, remains and equals divides perception of, and expressions about, time more operationally into actual cognitive categories that humans know how to act upon:
Since history and memory (representations of or belief about the past) are distinct in all philosophy and ontology from plan, vision or intent (representations of or will to change the future), statements that confuse these are category errors: No statement about history or memory can imply a similar statement about a plan or vision or intent, nor vice versa - a distinction sometimes credited to Hume who distinguished also the morality of a statement from its truth. The very different ways that humans process memory or agree on history (about the past) must be, according to most philosophers, kept distinct from ways we employ logic on snapshots of axioms about our own immediate present and the ways we plan and envision an uncertain and collective future. By contrast, theology does assert high value for some unquestioned and eternal past-to-future equivalences. By substituting these three verbs, even without clarifying morality (ought, shall, should, must) or the actor(s) who do or did something, becomes/remains/equals makes clear what time frame of relationship is asserted, and disallows assuming one stable past/present/future timeline - known as single scenario planning or blind linearity and considered a grave error in risk analysis.
Users of E-Prime also generally encourage other replacements that clarify subject, object, time frame, intent and scope of relationships, replacing:
While teaching at the University of Florida, Alfred Korzybski counseled his students to
eliminate the infinitive and verb forms of "to be" from their vocabulary, whereas a second group continued to use "I am," "You are," "They are" statements as usual. For example, instead of saying, "I am depressed," a student was asked to eliminate that emotionally primed verb and to say something else, such as, "I feel depressed when . . .," or "I tend to make myself depressed about . . ."
Korzybski showed measurable improvement "of one full letter grade" in the grades of students in the first group.[8] Although this took place before the invention of E-Prime, it does show the application of General Sementics to psychotherapy.
Albert Ellis advocated the use of E-prime, especially in writing, as a way to avoid muddled and blame-based thinking that makes psychotherapy patients distressed.[9] According to Ellis,
REBT has favored E-Prime more than any other form of psychotherapy and I think it is still the only form of therapy that has some of its main books written in E-Prime. [10]
E-prime is used in neuro-linguistic programming as a technique, and the theoretical basis of NLP relies heavily on Korzybski and Bourland's work. [11]
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 live or to die, I ask myself this.
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For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.
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All power belongs to God: He has ordained the powers on earth.
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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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Many authors have questioned E-Prime's effectiveness at improving readability and reducing prejudice (Lakoff, 1992; Cullen, 1992; Parkinson, 1992; Kenyon, 1992; French, 1992, 1993; Lohrey, 1993). These authors observed that a communication under the copula ban can remain 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:[14]
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."[15]