Comment by re | Hacker News Reader

Comment by re | Hacker News Reader

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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]."

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": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void#Plot_summary

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.

Actually the first sentence shows a loop-hole doesn't it?

> E-Prime, a prescriptive version of the English language, excludes all forms of the verb to be.

Doesn't the part parenthesised in commas have a kind of implicit 'is'?

For example E' is supposed to stop me saying things like 'Terminator is a good film and is 2 hours long', but I can say 'Terminator, a good film, lasts for 2 hours'.

It does. Specifically, it is carrying an implicit "which is":

> E-Prime, [which is] a prescriptive version of the English language, ...

That sentence should instead be written:

> E-Prime prescribes a version of the English language which excludes all forms of the verb "to be".

You can add "which is" to turn it into a relative clause, but it functions just fine as an apposition.

Regardless of whether the omitted grammatical structure has a name, it's still skirting the intent of E-prime. If inserting the words "which is" has no obvious affect on meaning, then it should probably be a candidate for rephrasing.

s/prescribes/is

Prescribe seems out of place there, anyhow.

Prescribe is a linguistic jargon. [0] It is exactly the correct word. And the whole point of E' is to remove is in such cases, because it carries an overloaded value which could change from person to person. In this case, a linguist would likely understand that it is prescribing a form of English, but not everyone would share that interpretation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription

He, my bad then. English is very contextual. Point in case, prescriptive could also mean a speaker of E' must speak prescriptive. As foreign speaker, i then figured it means descriptive, which would've made some sort of sense to me, but is actually the opposite in linguistic terms.

Now I get down into semantics, can E-Prime prescribe something or is it the name of a rule-set that can be prescribed? I lean to the latter, hence my remark is still valid?

On another note, I find the recursion mentioned by OP quite interesting in a broader context. Choice of grammar has meaning itself.

Edit: Ultimately though, language is inherently underspecified, I heard, and I suppose in linguistic context it means a lack of definite distinction. You could go on subdividing prescription into negative and positive, i.e. prohibitive and, say, constructive. You could divide that ad infinitum. No?

Exactly what I thought when I read the article. The proponents wanted to ban a class of semantics but instead chose to ban a relevant but totally different class of syntax.

(can't help rewriting to follow the style)

I have trouble imagining how to answer "What's E-Prime; I've never heard of it." without using the semantics of "to be". And answering that seems to me the primary goal of an encyclopedic article.

If the article starts with "E-Prime prescribes..." I still don't know what E-Prime _is_. Is it a committee? Is it a style guide? (Right now the article says it's a version of English, which, if superficially, at least answers the question).

Your original question is invalid because the questioner would never ask it if they only used E-Prime. Let's re-phrase your question with E-Prime: "Describe E-Prime to me, I've never heard of it."

You get the idea now? The very form of the question affects your understanding of the answer. Through the description you receive, you begin to understand what E-Prime means to those that came up with it. In E-Prime, you literally can't state what it is to anyone else because that would go against E-Prime's rules.

The questioner cannot use E-Prime because he doesn't know what E-Prime is. And before being interested in its description, he'll probably want to know what it is (is it a law? is it a game? is it a style guide? a brain training exercise? is it a dog?).

See, "E-Prime" is a proper noun, and proper nouns don't have a meaning; they instead refer to specific things (giving them an identity). The same way Spain is a country, E-Prime is "a variant of English."

You can't ask "What is E-Prime?" if you are not allowed to use the word is.

The person who has never heard of E-Prime will use the word "is" when asking what E-Prime means.

Makes the first sentence an even better summary, IMO.

Read it as an indefinite enumeration: read the first comma as an inclusive and, then ignore the second comma.

> stop me saying things like 'Terminator is a good film and is 2 hours long'

can't you say

>x is y and z,

do you need the second is?

> E-Prime uses the English language prescriptively.

there, now even the prescription is mentioned in a prescription. How recursive, init?

> Doesn't the part parenthesised in commas have a kind of implicit 'is'?

The part between the commas, I think, is called a subjunctive clause. Does it really break the "rules" of E'? The sentence still contains a verb, so it doesn't look like a loop-hole to me.

Loop holes don't break rules - by definition.

Yes, you're correct - loop holes don't break the rules. I conflated those two concepts. I meant to just ponder whether that clause is a loop hole or an intentionally allowed construct.

Yeah. And aren't there other verbs that have the same god-like implication as "is"?

I was thinking of "to do". If you say something like "X does Y", you're making the same kind of assertion E-Prime seems to want to avoid. Seems to me like another loophole.

I think 'to do' differentiates itself from 'to be' in E' because while people use 'to be' to make global declarations of property (e.g. "That movie is bad" vs "I didn't like that movie"), they use 'to do' to make global declarations of action (e.g. "The IRA does bad" vs "The actions of the IRA reflect violence").

While avoiding 'to do' additionally aides in specificity, I believe avoiding 'to be' has a bigger impact, and avoiding both near impossible.

I was wondering why that first "sentence" wasn't a sentence.

"E-Prime (short for English-Prime, sometimes denoted É or E′), a prescriptive prescribes a version of the English language which excludes all forms of the verb to be."

I haven't checked the whole article, but the second paragraph contains the phrase "could not be expressed," so it doesn't completely adhere to E-Prime.

Edit: I didn't notice earlier while viewing the mobile version of the page, but the Talk page includes a discussion of whether or not to enforce E-Prime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:E-Prime/Archive_1#Article....

"could not be expressed" is not a derivative of "to be". "be" there allows using "express" without needing the subject (e.g. "I can express my feeling" -> "My feeling can be expressed")

The Wikipedia article specifically mentions that the auxiliary uses of "to be" are also disallowed under E-Prime. (see Different functions of "to be", as well as Criticisms)

> 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"

In a way, you have found the purpose of E-Prime. While your speech or writing will use more words to avoid use of "to be," you will actually communicate more since you are describing more instead of simply making a proclamation. Word count will increase, but meaning and information will increase as well.

And yes, it did take me a little bit longer to write this comment following the constraint.

"my replacements stand out more when overused" - I have a different experience where repetition of "to be" derivatives equally stand out. As my first editing task after writing a paragraph, I eliminate such repetitions.

Someone made an edit that reintroduced the "is".

change: reintroduce the word "is" to the opening sentence, for clarity; fix sentence where a "speaker" becomes a "writer"

Nice

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