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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

I'm fascinated by the topic of English Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

It introduced me to the idea that 'is' should be treated very carefully. Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best. It also introduces heightens the emotional tone of a discussion. If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Foo-ness is a taint on his soul. Contrast that with reformulations that make it explicit that John's foo-ness is a fleeting association related to both his present situation, your current perception of it and the current socially accepted meaning of foo along with all it's implied baggage.

I realise I might be rather off-topic :-)

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> If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo.

Interestingly in Spanish and Portuguese there are two verbs of "to be": "ser" and "estar". These have different meanings: ser ist mostly used for persistent states of being, while estar is mostly used for something that is only temporarily as it is, but could be different the next time.

Isn't that a bit like "is" vs. "is being"?

The "is being" construct also exists by using the two verbs ("estar a ser") but it's not the same. Basically in order of permanence:

ser -> a mostly permanent characteristic

estar -> a current characteristic that could change in the future

estar a ser -> a characteristic of the specific interaction

Is that last one like, "I am to be married on Saturday"?

Not really, that's just a future tense. Here's the correspondence instantiated:

"I am tall" -> "sou alto" (ser)

"I am broke" -> "estou falido" (estar)

"I am being boring" -> "estou a ser aborrecido" (estar a ser)

What english doesn't have as easily without context is the distinction between the first two forms because it has a single verb for both.

In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879933 you gave an example of "estar a ser" for Portuguese. Since I currently try to learn both Spanish and Portuguese: Does a form similar to "estar a ser" also exist in Spanish or is it specific to Portuguese?

I think that pedrocr is from Portugal so in case you're learning Brazilian Portuguese you should consider that Brazilians usually use "estar + present participle" where the Portuguese use "estar a + infinitive" (for example "estou a falar" vs. "estou falando").

Brazilians thus have "estar sendo" which can be used in many cases where English has "is being", but as a non-native speaker I'm not sure what I can claim about its connotations or whether it's the same as "estar a ser". But my initial guess is that the Portuguese say "estou a ser" just as they say "estou a falar", while Brazilians say "estou sendo" just as they say "estou falando".

Spanish-speakers in turn have "estar siendo" with the Spanish present participle of ser, like "estoy siendo". I suspect this is the standard form of this construction in all kinds of Spanish.

Thank you for the explanation. This clarifies why I haven't (consciously) seen the "estou a + infinitive" form yet - the Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese forms look more familiar to me. :-)

You might have an amusingly confused time in Portugal, as I did!

"O comboio está a chegar."

(plus different phonology)

Yep, that's exactly it. "is being" and "estar a ser"/"estar sendo" are pretty much the same thing. What english doesn't have is the "ser"/"estar" distinction, both map to "to be".

> Isn't that a bit like "is" vs. "is being"?

I'm not a native speaker of English, so I might not perceive some subtleties. But at least how I perceive it is the meaning of "is being" is similar "estar", while "to be" is used for both meanings in English. In Spanish and Portuguese (as far as I understand it, I'm still learning a lot) "ser" is used only for the "permanent" meaning.

Not exactly; you would never say, "I am being hungry". You just say, "I am hungry" -- with the exact same form you'd use for, "I am amazing."

While there isn't a single word change, you can not merely say "I am hungry" to express a habitual state of hunger. Used without qualification, hunger is a transitory state. To express habitual hunger you could add a frequency qualifier, such as 'I am often hungry.'

On the other hand, "I am being amazing" is a perfectly valid construction, because 'amazing' by default describes a habitual state rather than a transitory one, and 'being' changes it to a current action rather than a habitual state.

An example that someone gave me when I started learning Portuguese is that someone could be insulted if she came to a party and you said "está linda!" or "que linda está!" because of the potentially implied contrast with her normal or usual appearance (akin to English "you look lovely" or "you look lovely tonight": does that mean to suggest that she normally doesn't?).

Also interesting is that this distinction occurs in some dialects of English as well. In AAVE, this is the distinction between "Elmo is eating cookies." and "Cookie Monster be eating cookies." The former indicates a current action that is taken. The latter indicates an action that is often taken. One is a statement about a person's actions, while the other is a statement about a person's habits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitual_be

The distinction between current and habitual actions also exists in standard English, of course: "Cookie monster eats cookies" vs "Elmo is eating cookies". I'm not sure whether this is quite the same as the distinction the comments you are replying to are talking about. They're talking about a less absolute way of using "is" to ascribe attributes, rather than actions. More like the distinction between "John is an angry man" and "John is angry right now".

The thing is that 'to be' is a special verb in English, so the distinction between "John is being angry" and "John is angry" isn't there, and "John is angry" could mean either current or habitual anger.

You can't argue that because a distinction exists for 'to eat' it also exists or is understood the same for 'to be'. English admits the sentence "Big bird does eat cookies" but not "John does be angry".

In the first case, I read both as temporary states, and the only way to express it as a habitual state would be to make a more complex construction such as 'John is an angry person.'

As for the second case, I think the usual way to achieve that effect in English is to use a frequency qualifier, such as in "John is sometimes angry," to modify the transitory state into a habitual one.

I had never heard of E-Prime, but this reminded me of Reginald Braithwaite's presentation "Optimism" [1].

He advocates becoming aware of when people use temporary or permanent language, and suggests using temporary language for criticizing other people and permanent language for praising people. This is a brilliant bit of human psychology that is highly practical in everyday situations.

I don't know whether E-Prime is practical, it seems problematic to try to police the language itself, but the goals & rationale have a good heart. We probably would be better off if we could all speak less dogmatically and hyperbolically.

I do recall someone here on HN mentioning attempts to create a new language in which one could not lie, I wonder if E-prime was what was being referred to...

  [1] https://github.com/raganwald/presentations/blob/master/optimism.md
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12298898

> Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best

I was going to say this is ironic but I will rather say I find this ironic

Who would admit to lying sometimes? Almost everyone. Who would admit to being a liar? Fewer people. But what is a liar other than someone who tells lies sometimes?

I agree that the idea something "is" something else is a tricky one in language.

The irregular nature of "to be" in English comes from it being a blend of three different roots with a somewhat similar division you're talking about (but certainly not as clear, division was more about tense than duration).

The fallacy you're talking about I consider a specific instance of the labeling problem. If someone is marginally in a group and you apply the label of the group on the individual, suddenly it seems ok to use attributes of the group to reason about the individual. One jumps from specific to general and back to specific again without acknowledging the loss of information from the abstraction layers. Often comes up in post hoc rationalisation of harsher criminal punishment, for example. John is a criminal; we need to be tougher with criminals; therefore we need to be tougher with John - without regard for the specifics of John's case.

One analysis of this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_(fallacy) but there might also be other ways of thinking about it.

The example given in that shows it's not the same thing at all.

How about in the other direction?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Converse_accident

While I don't mean to say that these provide a full analysis of the issue you're talking about, I don't see how they're unrelated to it.

I don't think you went off-topic at all. The article says "avoid judgement of a particular thing, since it will become outdated in future". E-prime says "now you can't make such judgements because I have taken away your tool of doing so". I think they have the same goal.

(I wrote this comment in E-prime :)

In the case of the judgments of Python that the original article refers to, I can see ways that E-prime could help (because the criticisms might be phrased more concretely, like "Python 3 lacks the 'u' qualifier for strings" or something, allowing a reassessment of whether this problem was still true in the future) but maybe one could still say something like "its creators designed Python 3 hastily and sloppily without regard to programmers' convenience", which, if true or believed at first, never stops being applicable even if the language gets improved later on.

English prime should help you become a better writer if only because it forces you to consider sentence structure which forces you to pay closer attention to what you're writing.

I didn't use it here because I'm lazy.

completely on point, actually. Plus a link to a cool, thought-provoking concept. thanks!

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