From: Hagbard Celine (hagbard@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Wed Jul 09 1997 - 10:19:18 MDT
-- Hagbard Celine Not a clerk of the nostalgia of the declining ruling class.
attached mail follows:
Hagbard Celine wrote:
> E-Prime is English without the verb "to be" (is, are, was); more
> specifically, without the "is of identity" ("John is a liar; Linda is a
> lawyer; Edgar is stupid.").
>
> E-Prime emerges from the tradition of General Semantics. The reason for
> E-Prime is that the "is of identity" connotes an eternal Platonic
> essence possessed by the thing that is said to "be" something. The "is
> of identity" tends to blind both the speaker and the audience to many
> important characteristics about the relationship between the person
> being described and the quality or category being assigned to them. "Joe
> is a racist": "Racism" is not a measurable quantity of an object like
> mass or momentum; there is no "racism meter" we can point to a person
> that will detect whether Joe has the "essence" of a "racist" in him.
> "Racist" is a _name_ we give to an object based on our observations of
> emergent phenomena like behavior; but the assignment of the label is in
> our heads, not in physical reality. E-Prime, by restricting the use of
> the "is of identity," makes explicit the fact that these are statements
> about the state of our nervous system, not about the outside world.
> E-Prime confines itself to observations and operational statements like
> "Joe frequently makes statements that sound racist to me" or even "I
> heard Joe say Angelo is a dirty wop."
>
> Examples of English
> sentences translated into E-Prime: ENGLISH: Marty is an asshole.
> E-PRIME: Marty frequently says things that make me
> angry. ENGLISH: Religious fanatics like David Koresh are dangerous.
> (Makes the implicit assignment "David Koresh was a
> religious fanatic.") E-PRIME: The government considered David Koresh,
> whose followers believed he was God, a danger to
> their authority. (Talks about who holds what beliefs.) ENGLISH: Natalie
> Merchant's voice is the most beautiful in the world.
> E-PRIME: I like Natalie Merchant's voice better than anyone else's.
> ENGLISH: Natalie Merchant is a Commie dupe.
> E-PRIME: Natalie Merchant has said she thinks private property is bad.
> (An operational statement of an observable fact
> regarding something somebody has said.) [dV/dt] #
Sorry, I forgot to tell you where I got this little explaination.
http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Bionomics/Extropians/FAQ.Extropians0.09.html
I don't know if this is an official FAQ, but I definitely found it
useful.
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