Well, I too have been exposed to E-Prime mostly through the work of RAW. There appears to be a certain liberation from traps that are created by linguistic representation of being. That is, by negating the use of “is” we move to (re)present our experiences via language in a more careful and a sensible manner: we don’t make claims about what is, but we make claims about how things appear to us. This fits nicely with RAW’s distinction between etic and emic reality. While such a distinction is useful in some circumstances it is not useful in all circumstances. I comment briefly on this here.
It seems to me the big thing about E-Prime is that it avoids the formulation of “absolute” claims. We learn to negate the use of certain bits of language to better (re)present our interpretation of phenomena. Words like ‘all’, ‘never’, ‘always’, ‘forever’, etc. are dropped from use along with various conjugations of the verb “to be” operating as the main verb of a given sentence.
Now, as has been mentioned directly above, problems occur as a function of the way our language comes to (re)present experience. Our language is structured on reflecting a ‘Subject’-‘Verb’-‘Object’ interpretation of reality. However, things are (or in E-Prime "seem to be") always changing—there doesn’t appear to be anything static in the universe. Thus, not only does the verb “to be” seem to give a false impression of unchanging or fixed phenomena, I’d argue that any noun or pronoun (Subject &/v Object word) also does the same thing. This might tie into the discussion that Quantum and I are currently having in the “What is ‘this’” thread.
While E-Prime appears to be an interesting development in language, it also appears to me to be bulky and often workable only with a linguistic flexibility that is on par with a contortion artist’s limber body. What I mean is that it appears to be too difficult and unworkable to use in every linguistic act that an individual might need to perform. For example let’s say that I formulate the following sentence based upon my interpretation of my experience:
“While the sun was shinning brightly on this Thursday afternoon I had the pleasure of seeing one of the neighbourhood rabbits hop gingerly across the lawn, pausing to eat some grass before scooting off behind the fence of our next door neighbour’s yard.”
Now, to truly rewrite this sentence in E-Prime seems to be a freakin’ nightmare! To really stick to the criteria of E-Prime, I’d have to cash out every noun with a variation of some combination of words. For example, instead of employing nouns such as “the sun” or “the lawn” I have to alter how these phenomena of my experience are expressed in language: every noun presupposes existence—a form of “to be”, after all. So, I’d have to say something like:
“While a phenomena that appears to me as what gets commonly called “the sun” seemed to me to be [notice here that “to be” is still present in E-Prime, however, the main verb becomes “seems” and “to be” becomes subjugated to that verb] expressing an action called “shinning” on what appears to be Thursday afternoon I seemed to have something commonly referred to as “pleasure” when it appeared to me that I saw a phenomena called “a rabbit” which appeared to me to execute an action called “hopping” in manner which seemed to (re)present the motion commonly called “across” with respect to something that appeared to me to be “a lawn,”…
We can see that E-Prime is difficult and bulky, and it really chews up the parsimonious and poetic power of expression qua language (although, perhaps my E-Prime is merely inefficient because I don’t make a habit of using it in every circumstance!). Thus, while I think that certain problems that E-Prime intends to solve are worth trying to solve, it also seems to me that E-Prime is like a meat clever in its attempts to solve these problems. Perhaps a better way to go is not to alter the language so much as to alter our understanding of how are language functions to (re)present our experiences of phenomena. Put differently, we can still use language as it is, but perhaps need to alter the way we understand the bits of language that we use (bits like Objects, Verbs, and Subjects). By altering our understanding of how these aspects of syntax work to (re)produce our experiences we seem to be in a better position to avoid certain metaphysical traps that arise from linguistic expression.
That’s how I see it, anyway… |
