Talk:E-Prime

correction

An anonymous user wrote:

CORRECTION: the inventor of E-Prime was a student and follower of Alfred Korzybski, Dr. Bourland.

W. Paul Tabaka http://Korzybski.Org

Different Uses of "to be" Section Incomplete

The section starts out good but then gets to "location", "noun copula place". Bullshit. It should be "prepositional phrase" and "noun copula prepositional phrase". Such is proven by "I am against capital punishment", clearly missing both location and place. As an added bonus, we'd avoid the question is "on the mat", as he insinuates in case of his example, truly the place, or is that rather simply "the mat"? After all, no one would dispute that the city, for example, is a place. "Are you the city?" Unlikely, as one cannot be a place, contrary to what "noun copula place", in context of Editor's other Different Uses, implies. "I am the city" loses to "I am from" there. "from...", indeed "on...", is in fact more adjective than locative, as in more like his "noun copula adjective" than "noun copula location". I expect to see this bullshit cleared up by the time I get home from work tomorrow. Tomblikebomb (talk) 02:52, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Appearance/Reality problems

There are a few places in this article in which the E-prime translations of sentences of the form 'o is F' to sentences of the form 'o appears[looks/feels/tastes] F' are uncritically stated as in some ways better, because they either more accurately capture the content of a subject's experience, or prevent confusing opinion with fact.

This seems to me completely POV. Issues about the content of experience are controversial in both modern psychology and philosophy. Similarly, translating to E-Prime arguably leads to the very confusion it is designed to prevent. For example, with the introduction, I could say 'The movie was good, but I didn't like it'. The E-prime translation would be 'I liked the movie but I didn't like it', which is a contradiction. Plausibly, the first sentence is not; it's a perfectly sensible english expression. The E-Prime translation goes wrong because it incorrectly takes the first conjunct to be expressing an opinion of the subject.

Anyway, I'm not here to argue against the claims proponents of E-Prime make. Rather, this article is currently presenting those claims as fact, and this is POV. I'll have a go correcting it later, unless anyone has any issues.Gabbble (talk) 09:42, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Does sign language have an E-Prime nature?

I have read this page, and I wonder if sign language (as used by deaf signers) is an example of a language in the E-Prime model. It has been claimed that BSL (British Sign Language) does not contain the verb 'to be' ( As a reasonably fluent BSL signer, I am slightly skeptical of this.) - would this mean that BSL has an 'E-Prime' nature?

What do you think? ASL signers are also welcome to chip in. RedTomato (talk) 20:06, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

I think this may be a question for the language reference desk. — Tobias Bergemann (talk) 07:35, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

I don't sign myself, but in introductions I've seen, it has always seemed to me that an identity verb is implied by context, so this would place it in the same category of languages as Arabic and Russian (as mentioned in the article). JulesH (talk) 19:04, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Almost E-Prime, but not quite

This article conforms almost entirely, but not entirely, to E-Prime. The "Criticisms" section, in particular, needs reframing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.241.239.232 (talk) 00:36, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

We shouldn't be trying to rewrite this article in E-Prime, just as we shouldn't be trying to rewrite the limerick (poetry) article as a series of limericks. WP:TONE tells us to "follow the style used by reliable sources, while remaining clear and understandable" - rewording "these are category errors" to "these fall into the category of category errors" might be good E-Prime, but it loses clarity in tone, and is not how a "reliable source" (a newspaper or academic paper) would write it. --McGeddon (talk) 18:18, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Bad Poem Translation

"Honey tastes sweet,/And so do you." does not convey the same meaning as "Honey is sweet,/And so are you." The adjective "sweet" takes on a different meaning in the 4th line of the poem which is completely lost in the translation. This is somewhat creepy and a terrible example of E-Prime. Perhaps there is a better translation of this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.12.88.141 (talk) 06:44, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

I thought so too. Besides the poem is very trivial. A more difficult challenge would be this famous sentence from the King James Bible, Romans Chapter 13: "For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God." Borock (talk) 09:10, 10 August 2011 (UTC)