Willem Larsen and Urban Scout have put together an amazing, thorough, and much-needed introduction to “E-Primitive.” Larsen’s explorations of animist language and oral tradition at the College of Mythic Cartography have contributed greatly to the growing rewilding movement, and this work summarizes much of that work in a single piece. We at the Tribe of Anthropik feel proud to present this work, cross-posted from Urban Scout and the College of Mythic Cartography. We don’t necessarily agree with all the details, but that hardly matters next to the importance of the main point, with which we could hardly agree more. This article greatly inspired us, and we hope it will inspire you, too.
Does the language we speak blind us to the way the world works? Can we make better observations, and therefore better choices, by changing the way we speak?
English, a language of commerce, exists as an amalgam of countless languages—Latin, Greek, Germanic, French. It embodies the spirit of a homeless, rootless culture. As it evolves, it acquires more and more words, getting more and more specific.
As a language of commerce, the strength of English lies in its low-context, highly technical/specific capacity. “Low-context” means you don’t have to know back-story or belong to a specific subculture to understand English the world over. Business English stays the same globally, along with software/IT English, agricultural English, oil/petroleum/geologic English, etc.
Conversely, animist languages (those that come from indigenous cultures deeply connected to their place) can barely keep it together to stay consistent from one side of the valley to the next. Why? Because they base themselves entirely on connection to place. Their specificity lies in nonverbal experience of a specific, unique place, or cycle of places (in terms of nomadicism).
Language determines how we communicate our experiences of the world. Therefore, it also limits what we can see and how we see the world. You could say that language works as the lens of our cultural eyeglasses. In sustainable cultures, language extends beyond humans to the landscape and the spirit world. In unsustainable cultures the language abstracts the culture from the land, holding its members hostage, forcing the people to continue a destructive lifestyle, even to death.
As members of civilization, perhaps the most unsustainable culture ever, we can assume that our language and therefore thoughts, serve to separate us from the land. If we want to free ourselves from the destruction, we may alleviate the process by digging our way back in time through English, and studying the remnants of animist languages, we can find a more indigenous origin point with which we can carry forward a more realistic view of our world.
What came first, the chicken or the egg? Often when philosophizing about thought, language, and actions the question comes up; “did changing our way of life to farming come from a deceived perception of the planet, or did our deceived perception of the planet come form farming as a way of life?” We can’t answer that, but we can tell you that to us, it feels like a little of both. So why not rewild the way you talk, while you rewild the way you walk? It becomes easier to walk your talk if your talk can help you walk. Get it? We feel it has worked for us, and maybe it will for you too.
To Be: Masters of the Universe
Though civilization had long abstracted its language by this time, our personal linguistic adventure began with Aristotle’s writings. No animistic indigenous cultures have the verb “to be.” We don’t know when this verb came into popular use in civilization but we do know that we first see the foundations of “to be” expressed in Aristotle’s “Laws of Thought,” which contain three basic principles.
- That a thing is what it is: A is A. This became known as the premise of identity.
- That anything is either A or not-A. This became known as the premise of the excluded middle.
- Something cannot be both A and not-A. This became known as the premise of non-contradiction.
Some 2 millennia later, the “is” of identity has dominated the English language. So much so, that it seems nearly impossible to speak without it. Go ahead. Try speaking for five minutes without saying is, was, are, am, were, be, been.
Many problems occur when adapting to the Aristotelian Orientation of English. “To be” supposes that the world never changes, but remains in a fixed state. It casts the world into separate parts: black and white, good and evil. This “is” that. A man can only love a woman. A woman can only love a man.
The development and enhancement of the verb to be reflects civilizations quest for absolute control of the cosmos. To label things as fixed in time, you attempt to undermine the very essence of this universe: change. In a world where nothing can remain fixed, it seems a bit psychotic to perceive it as such, though I think you can probably imagine how a verb like this would have had an easy time developing in a sedentary, civilized culture. Civilization itself a product of agriculture, and agriculture an attempt to resist the changing world, to control the food supply. The unpredictable nature of change seems like the biggest threat to an agricultural based culture. They cannot move with the land, so they feel they must control it.
Without the verb to be, civilization’s prized philosopher Descartes could not have made his famous addition to civilized thought, “I think, therefore I am.” Nor could civilization’s prized playwright Shakespeare have written his famous line, “To be or not to be? That is the question.” Nor could civilization’s prized pacifist Gandhi have said the famous line, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” None of these statements make any sense in a real, constantly fluctuating world.
The term E-prime (short for English-Prime) refers to a version of English without the use of the verb “to be.” Basically a group of scientists studying quantum physics began to realize that “to be” and a lot of English does not reflect the nature of the universe. The General Symantics Movement began with Alfred Korzybski in his 1933 book, Science and Sanity. His student, David Bourland took the movement further by coining the phrase E-prime and abolishing the verb “to be” altogether. A common e-prime example shows us that an electron appears as a wave when measured with one instrument, and appears as a particle when measured with another. This defies Aristotelian English. E-prime mostly has its roots in scientific inquiry. Though we hate most scientists and scientific inquiry, we agree that the verb “to be” presents an inaccurate view of reality. As animists inspired by e-prime, we have taken it even further and in a new direction, to create what we call E-Primitive (short for English Primitive).
Animist languages stem from people who have lived as close to the land as humanly possible. Their languages have shifted with the land for millions of years. They present maybe the most accurate and deeply perceived connection to the world. In order to help shape E-Primitive, we must look at the how animist languages work.
Developing & Using E-primitive
1. Make Some Noise
Animist languages begin with sound and mimicry. If you know birds, then someone imitating bird calls will immediately bring that bird (and everything it relates to—habitat, season, myth, coloring, survival use, edibility, character) to mind. The brilliant flowering diversity of mouth-sounds in native languages, hisses, clicks, pops, gutturals, reflects the astounding variety of sounds that hit the human ear. As languages lose their animism and become civilized, they round out, lose sounds, and shrink. You can find exceptions to this (Mohawk only has a little over a dozen sounds), but this works well as a general rule.
Simple playful mimicry will over time rewild your language. To make a game of referring to birds by their song or alarm calls makes a good beginning, rather than signifying through the name of the british naturalist who “discovered” them (Steller’s Jay, Clark’s Nutcrack, Bewick’s Wren, blah blah blah).
2. Patterns of Behavior/Movement/Activity
Animist languages seek to describe patterns of activity, and to connect similar patterns to each other. To separate the way of the coyote away from words describing sneaky behavior, destroys connection, destroys layering. In fact, to use the word “coyote” also means to “act like a coyote,” “to sneak.” In fact, the word “talêpês” means most properly “to act like a coyote.”
So in English, we can describe this as “the word coyote does not describe a thing, but a pattern of activity—we must denote a coyote by saying that it ‘acts like a coyote.’ We cannot point out a coyote itself.” In an animist language we’d find it difficult or impossible to say what we just said. English intrinsically looks for Aristotelian essences, inner natures, fixed realities, whereas native trackers know that a set of tracks may match the pattern of coyote activity, but that does not mean that “a coyote” made them. In quantum mechanics: “is it” a particle or a wave? Pointless question that creates a paradox. In animist language, “does it move” like a particle? a wave? Effortless conceptualization of a former paradox created by the actual structure of a language dedicated to enslavement according to rigid classes and conceptions.
Try this exercise in e-primitive: every time you notice yourself looking at something as if it just “exists,” as an object fixed in time and space, we want you to come up with all the ways that it actively interacts with the world. For example, a glass cup not only contains liquid, or air, but the glass that forms the cup oozes downward at an imperceptible rate (those who’ve studied chemistry will know that glass behaves as a liquid). Also, the glass may have fingerprints on it, or scratches, that slowly age. Also, it refracts light in diverse ways. Old glasses will have more character than young, freshly crafted ones. Etc. Remember, if you hold the glass, it pushes back with an equal and opposite reaction. The glass literally vibrates at an atomic level. Everything enacts patterns of movement.
Just play with looking at the world in this way. It’ll totally screw with you, but it’ll shoot your tracking through the roof. Funny how quickly this way of observing/interacting takes you right into the heart of animism.
3. Metaphorical Layering
Animists speak high-context, low specific/technical languages. One word serves for many, many meanings, mediated on context. You could call this “metaphor,” layering, poetry, etc., whatever, animist languages do it intrinsically. For example, Apache trackers use the same words for the geologic landscape (cliffs, valleys, ridges, canyons) as they do to describe the microcosm of the inner world of an animal track. Or, in english, to describe stealthy activity, we could say “sneak, slink, creep, tiptoe, move furtively, etc,” while in the Chinuk wawa speakers would just say “talêpês,” which means coyote, sneak, move furtively, slink, creep, etc. all at the same time.
4. Re-Verb the Noun
Because animists languages base themselves in movement/activity, you’ll commonly see the world in terms of verbs, and rarely (or not at all, depending on the particular language) in noun-entities. In Mohawk green also means herbs/greenery/grass, it describes a pattern of appearance, not an entity. In Mohawk, one points out a “hunter” by saying “ratorats,” literally “he-hunts.” Civilized languages innovated the professional class, thus labels like “Hunt-er,” “plumb-er,” “farm-er,” etc. “He-hunts,” “he-plumbs,” “she-farms,” etc. Notice the difference between calling someone an “artist” and saying that “they create art.” Many of us can finally let go of civilized conceptions of success once we click into this thinking—”one day, I’ll be” an artist/writer/tracker/hunter-gatherer.” Do you make art? Do you write? Do you track? Do you hunt and gather? Only that can we honestly describe. “When will I grow up? When will I feel like an adult?” Do you do adult things? Do you do activity associated with “grown-ups”?
One famous Iroquois speaker, whose name we mistranslate as “Cornplanter,” would correctly require us to call him in his native language “He-plants-corn.” Your ear has probably picked up on all the Native American names that fit this model, and the few that don’t, which we can easily explain as a similar mistranslation.
Look at “nouns” as “verbs”; re-verbify them. For example, “talêpês” does not mean “to act like coyote,” but rather it means “to coyote.” As in, I coyote, you coyote, he coyotes, we coyote, they coyote, “they coyoted across the field”. In Mohawk, familial relations work as verbs—he-fathers-me, I-grandchild-her. If you’ve ever had someone ask “Who’s this?” in reference to your mother and tried to answer in e-prime, you can see the pickle it puts you in. “Uh—she gave birth to me? She raised me?” Really, what she does you can best describe as “mothering” you. How easily e-primitive solves the stupid (a little emotion here, heh) question, “who are my real parents?” or “You”re not my Mother!!” Does she mother you? A word that we already use that way in English from time to time. Others: A pet isn’t a pet, they keep you company (companion). In Chinuk wawa, you say “mitlayt kupa naika” or “such-and-such living being/’object’ sits with me.”
We do this all the time in English. He “fishtailed” all over the road. I “cupped” the water in my hand. Let’s “table” that vote. We can just do it more and more, staying aware that the nouns speak more accurately when used to describe a pattern of appearance or movement.
So, “I traveled to the store today,” could work just fine, if you think of “store” as a verb (to “store” boxes). Think about it—those U-Store rental places actually have quite the e-primitive ring to it—they’ve named themselves after the pattern of activity that best describes their business.
Why describe those same birds according to some other person’s idea of their character or coloring (Mourning Dove, Northern Flicker, Pileated Woodpecker, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, etc.). Why not re-own them, and call them by the pattern you see them demonstrate? “Watches-among-the-reeds,” “Thistle-ambles-without-care,” etc.? The next time you have an argument over “is it this or that” with someone, consider stepping out of the civilized framework. Does it behave like this? Does it behave like that? If both, what third thing emerges? Do both patterns together create a new possibility?
All this goes to explain why we need not just “E-prime” (no verb to-be), but E-primitive. In E-prime I can still use professional labels, like police officer/soldier/politician, but these imply intrinsic craft-oriented natures. If I point out an accountant to you, and say they also happen to “be” the greatest painter of the age, can you feel the smoke come out of your ears? E-primitive must jettison anything that gets in the way of as close to a reflection of the world as possible.
5. Tear Down the Prison of Identity
“Is that” a woman? “Is that” a man? “Am” I gay? “Am” I straight? “Am” I good? “Am” I evil? “Am” I Christian? “Am” I Jewish? “Am” I rewilded? “Am” I a Taker? “Am” I a Leaver? “Am” I an anarchist? Who “am” I?
You can”t even construct these pointless, meaningless questions in a language that sees the world as an active, creating, destroying, celebrating process. Even to call it a “process” creates a noun-state—more accurately, you could call it “process-ing”. Do you notice how that brings it alive, makes it vibrate, to acknowledge that it hasn’t stopped doing, and may do something else at any time? Fuck the verb to be.
Saying “I hunt and gather” rather than “I am a hunter-gatherer” pretty much encapsulates the whole idea, with a little bit of an E-primitive bias. You see, E-prime enthusiasts would mostly agree with the use of -er professional labels, as in “I make a living as a hunter-gatherer”. Hence my support of the E-primitive focus.
A few examples:
“I was born in 1905,” could change to, “My mother gave birth to me in 1905,” “I entered this world in 1905,” “My birth happened in the year 1905,” etc.
“My name is Pancho Villa,” could change to, “People call me Pancho Villa”, “My parents named me Pancho Villa”, “I answer to Pancho Villa”, “Allow me to introduce myself: Pancho Villa”, etc. As you may notice, this one sounds a little clunky in English, but I would suggest that clunkiness should not bar us from using it. All kinds of slang and jargonisms sound clunky at first (Valley Girl talk, anyone?), but they gain footing because enthusiasts use them. They probably gain footing so well because they also identify and mark the boundaries for a clique that does want to separate itself from the sensibilities of a larger group. So hail Clunky! Anyway—
“This is my Mother,” could change to, “She mothers me”, “She gave birth to me”, etc. Another tough one.
“This is my Son,” could change to, “He sons me (?)”, “I raise him”, “I call him son”, etc. Familial terms point out the effed up nature of our language, which fundamentally obsesses with ideas of ownership and roles, rather than relationships. Who cares if “he”s” your son, does he son you? It takes a Village, right?
“Today is the 13th of April,” could change to, “Today falls on the 13th of April”. Think about this. What bullshit to say that “Today ‘is’” anything! Today (this 24 hour period) falls on an infinite number of dates according to an infinite array of calendars, for an infinite number of planets, solar systems, galaxies, universes. Today happens today. We can’t say any more than that. According to the calendar which our American culture popularly uses, we mark “today” as the 13th of April. Robert Anton Wilson, a really cool and iconoclastic author, used to mark the dates on his blog with a different calendar for every blog entry. You cannot imagine some of the crazy calendars he dug up.
“This is my friend,” could change to, “We’ve befriended [notice “to be” still lurking in this one though] each other”, “I feel close to him”, “We have a close relationship”, “we partner up”, etc.
6. Break the Shackles of Factuality
Civilized peoples worship facts, reliable unchange-ables. A common defense of the concept of “fact” goes, “Well, it’s a fact that the sun will rise tomorrow. That we know.” Since I know of many Native American cultures that feel that in order for the sun to rise, they must call it up, and welcome it, and if they don”t, it may not rise that day, I know that it won’t surprise them when the Sun’s furnace goes cold, or if the earth itself gets pushed out of orbit by very real cosmic phenomena (asteroids, nomadic black holes, etc.). A civilized reaction to that would involve saying, “well, yes, our science predicts that, but you know it’s a fact that…”
7. Study Your Local Pidgin
The word Pidgin refers to languages that spontaneously grow from two or more separate languages as a means of communication between speakers of different tongues, and usually a simplified form of one of the languages. Pidgins work as second languages rather than native ones. By this definition, e-primitive works more like a pidgin; a mix of english and more animistic languages. It works as a means of communication between domesticated people and the wild landscape. We cannot recommend enough that you study your local pidgin or a native tongue of your bioregion, or ancestral past.
Final Thoughts
Civilized people fear change and wish to dominate and control and fixate that change which cannot remain fixed. Civilized languages mirror and perpetuate these insane actions by framing the thoughts and experiences of the people. They describe reality using fixed states of “being,” action-less, noun-based sentence structures, and so-called “facts” all so that they can feel safe that the world will not change on them.
To animist people fluidity forms the basis of their languages, and the ongoing change-ability and need to re-new and court the universe daily, monthly, yearly, gives life its meaning, gives life its center. They feel safe knowing the universe has moods just like us. That same notion horrifies civilized folks.
E-primitive, as the field of inquiry concerned with rewilding our language, does not intend to ” fix” English, but to keep adding wildness until it squeezes out the domesticated thought-forms and structures. We suggest approaching rewilding english with a sense of play. People have asked us, “Won’t messing with English make it sound silly, like pig latin?” But of course, children still speak pig latin, don’t they, and have invented countless variants, on’tday ouyay owknay? If people enjoy it and get benefit out of it, they will use it.
In some senses, this touches on the idea of taking back the source of our entertainment and social activity. We use to make languaging a central social activity, a source of prestige, excellence, and collaboration. To encourage language play takes us back to this.
We need never worry about the “scale” of the E-primitive revolution. The central indigenous tenet encourages us to propagate diversity; this makes scale irrelevant. I can guarantee you more people than you think, right now, have begun playing with rewilding their language in their own regions, in their own way. We each need to simply stay true to our own landbase and ecology, and speak the language that fits this place.
Remember that E-primitive has no rules, and no end point, because language itself has no endpoint. Regardless of Webster and his dictionary, language has and will continue to adapt and drift on its own. As long as you stick to the base; that the world has a constant flux, E-primitive can change anywhere, anytime, and hopefully will take root in your particular landbases.
Everyone has a different starting point. We don’t speak 100% E-Primtively and probably never will. For us, cutting out the verb “to be” in our writing started us on this journey. Others may have a more difficult time making that leap and maybe some even strive not to use verbal communication at all. Whatever you feel, we suggest you find your own particular starting point. Go where your inspiration lies; we see no one right way to go E-primitive.
Helpful Resources
He-wrote-this:
Willem Larsen, College of Mythic Cartography
He-contributed-and-edited-this:
Urban Scout, urbanscout.org
Books:
- Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
- Wisdom Sits in Places by Keith Basso
- The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun or any other book by Martin Prechtel
- Animism by Graham Harvey
- The Hobbit Companion by David Day
- To Be or Not: An E-prime Anthology edited by David Bourland
As a student sympathetic to a weak version of Sapir-Worf, and experimental language such as e-prime — still I’ve got to say, this post contains a lot of falsehood and disingeniousness.
Two different verb senses are covered by “to be” in English - the copula and “to exist”. I am an anarchist is an example of the former, but To be, or not to be and I think, therefore I am use the latter. (To exist, or not to exist is equivalent in meaning.)
The claim that languages of uncivilized peoples never have the copula is totally false. Proto-Indo-European had it.
More importantly, languages without an explicit copula word can always still express the idea of it.
Truly we can improve discourse by avoiding “A is B” sentences, but this is fundamentally a matter of being specific, not that the copula is evil in itself. For behind every thought it lurks: any sentence “X” can be rephrased as “It is the case that X”. So are we to stop speaking in predicates altogether?
Silliness like this, and like accusing that “Civilization worships facts” (whereas in reality it tends to worship Nationalism and other non-facts) — this only detracts from the rewilding movement. Isn’t the main point of discourse to figure out the facts? Important ones, y’know, like Civilization inevitably harms the ecosystems on which we depend, The idea of Sustainable Agriculture is pretty much propaganda, Neolithic Man’s brutish “caveman” image is archaeologically unjustified …
Comment by Cloud — 18 March 2008 @ 10:15 PM
I think the purpose, Cloud, of this piece is not to make headway in terms of reaching truths, but about laying out trails to follow in altering, or re-wilding, the perceptual lens through which we view the world. Because language and perception inextricably play off of each other (Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous testifies to that), changing the way we speak, and thus perceive, from the Cartesian plane of objects, truth, and absolutes to a vibrant, flowing, changing, and unfolding landscape situates itself as integral to the re-wilding movement.
Does this make sense?
Comment by wildeyes — 18 March 2008 @ 10:36 PM
First of all, you should know that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis came into the world as a straw man, that neither Sapir nor Whorf proposed themselves. Read the ‘Whorf hypothesis hoax’ and many other such articles here:
http://www.enformy.com/alford.htm
So to reference that hypothesis suggests that you have some more in depth exploring in front of you. I suspect you’ll enjoy it, rather than finding it inconvenient, as most ‘establishment’ linguists have.
I won’t deny that the article needs some brushing up, as Jason posted on version of something I wanted to update for a while now. But I certainly feel satisfied with the perspective I present in relation to the points you raise.
Jason can rebut your suggestion that Indo-Europeans had some original indigenous status far better than I could.
Certainly we can always insert a hidden ‘to be’ in our language, whether or not we do it. E-prime/primitive merely supports us in our efforts to consciously stop that habit.
If you the article feels silly and irrelevant to you, then I encourage you to ignore it. But don’t doubt that it has inspired and increased sincere inquiry into sane and human ways of expressing ourselves, in kinship with our indigenous ancestors, and I don’t consider that silly at all.
Comment by Willem — 18 March 2008 @ 10:39 PM
Indeed, the E-Prime literature goes into this with some depth, including Bourland’s anthology, To Be or Not, cited at the end of the article. “To be” actually has three senses: the copula, as a synonym for “to exist,” and for the passive voice. Both the copula and the passive voice relate to Bourland’s claim that any time you use the verb, “to be,” you lie. The third meaning, as a synonym for “to exist,” doesn’t bother even David Bourland, but it does mean that “to be” either indicates a deceit, or has no meaning of its own whatsoever, since “exist,” “dwell” or some other verb could have given you at least as much meaning, and usually more.
So you would consider Proto-Indo-Europeans uncivilized? I would not. To quote Wikipedia:
Personally, I would not consider a Neolithic culture based on domesticated animal husbandry, and the predecessors of so much of modern civilization, a particular example of an uncivilized people.
English has other copulas besides “to be,” including “seem,” “become,” “get” and “feel,” all of which work just fine in E-Prime and E-Primitive. Many non-English languages have the zero copula. So yes, even in English, you can express the copula without the verb “to be” or the whole static, disembodied perspective that comes with it. Feel and seem both give us a copula while grounding us in our direct senses, rather than appealing to objective truth; even become gives you a copula while maintaining a perspective of constant change and dynamism.
Only by lying, I’d say. “I see a red apple.” If you turn that into, “It is the case that I see a red apple,” you’ve made an unverifiable claim. I reported that I saw a red apple, but “is it” really the case? By restating it in that way, you’ve lent it far more weight as a fact of objective truth than it really deserves. As David Bourland put it, you’ve lied a little bit.
I said at the outset that I didn’t agree with all details, and I’ve had long, stimulating discussions with Willem and Scout about the nature of science, but you’ve misinterpreted this statement. When Willem says, “Civilization worships facts,” he certainly does not mean that “Civilization worships absolute statements of objective truth,” but rather, “Civilization worships the delusion that it can make absolute statements of objective truth.” There, I don’t think he’s gone very far off. The Fact, the notion that we have a long list of such statements, lies at the heart of the Modernist perspective. I take issue with the myth of the Fact, as well; such absolute truth claims divorce us from our sensuous experience, after all. Claiming that something “is the case” makes a claim we could never possibly know; we should say what we see, hear, think, feel, and so on. Our language should always come back to the one thing we ever truly know, the only domain that matters: our direct, sensuous experience.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 March 2008 @ 10:54 PM
Its seems ironic that such a complex and esoteric process is deemed important to achieve a simplification. And that in order to be more free we have to follow another’s suggestions and suppress our habits. I guess language is tricky because it is a form of bondage that links us to other people. We have to reach a level of agreement on the details in order to communicate effectively. If an anarchist linguist speaks in the forest, does anyone understand them?
There is a typo also that no-one picked up on so far, or should I write that as “a typo manifested itself unto my conciousness”. Am I the only one who actually reads Jason’s posts?
“A common e-prime example shows us that an electron appears as a wave when measured with one instrument, and appears as a wave when measured with another.” (should be wave and particle respectively no?)
That seems like a strange example to hold up as it was discovered as a result of highly objectivist scientific inquiry. I don’t see science having any major problems with duality and overlap of properties, or comprehension of the nature of subjective conciousness.
This whole post reminds me of the novel “Gadsby” where they managed to avoid using the letter E for the entire story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
Both approaches are interesting, but do either manage to achieve what it sets out to do? Can anyone point to an example of a novel insight gained from banishing “to be” from their language? Or is it just a form of humility in admitting the subjectiveness and transience of experience every moment of your life?
Comment by Shane — 19 March 2008 @ 1:48 AM
Anyone who wants to see E-prime explored and utilised to its fullest might want to check out R.A.W’s Quantum Psychology which seamlessly weaves quantum physics, e-prime and non-Aristotlean thinking together. R.A.W. wrote the whole book without having to use “to be.” Here’s a great introduction to E-prime, taken from Q.P. I think.
Comment by Dan Bartlett — 19 March 2008 @ 5:46 AM
Previous post (dan bartlett) : broken link.
Is this one : http://www.rawilson.com/quantum.html any better ?
Comment by Jean-Vivien Maurice — 19 March 2008 @ 12:02 PM
Science comes closest in civilized culture to seeing a need for the removal of “to be”, because it purports to examine reality.
However, the culture of science as a whole certainly resists this notion. Researchers write their papers in passive-tense constantly, considering it a virtuous activity (removal of the fallible “observer” - a clear impossibility however). This of course only perpetuates experimental error, because it makes it difficult to think about whether Researcher A or Researcher B performed the titration in paper X, because we only know: “The titration was performed”. It muddles the waters, it clouds thinking. That should justify the practice of e-prime, by itself.
Comment by Willem — 19 March 2008 @ 1:01 PM
Sgëno, Shane—
I want to leave behind the vitriolic exchanges we’ve so often had in the past, but when you post comments like that, it certainly makes it difficult to see any other way to respond. Do you really find it ironic that an anarchist would make a suggestion? Anarchists oppose structures of power and domination, not suggestions. No one has decreed that you cannot use the verb “to be”; this article simply lays out the suggestion, and why you might want to take it into consideration. It seems actively dishonest to me to try to draw the parallel between a reasoned suggestion and an authoritative decree, as your assertion of irony so slyly does. And because you don’t make the connection overtly, but instead hide behind rhetoric about its “irony,” you make the connection without ever coming straight out with it and taking responsibility for it.
Removing “to be” from English does not strike me as a particularly “complex and esoteric process,” particularly since it simplifies English by, well, one word. But more importantly, I don’t see anything complex or esoteric about it. A major theme of rewilding reminds us how our trained civilized habits have their origins not in any adaptive pattern of dwelling, but in domestication and the processes that have brought the planet, and our species, to its current crisis. Re-evaluating our habits lies at the very root of rewilding. Why you would find it ironic that we would question one more habit of civilized ontology, I do not know. But to call it “complex” makes a claim that I simply cannot see at all; it comes from a different perspective, yes, but in what way can you justify the assertion that a verb-based perspective of the world has any more complexity than a noun-based one? To use the comparison quoted by Dan Moonhawk Alford, do you focus on the dancers, or the dance? How does it involve more complexity to describe the dance, rather than the dancers?
And again, with statements like, “Am I the only one who actually reads Jason’s posts?” You posted your comment just six hours after I published the article, and you point to a trivial typographical error (I’ve fixed it in the text). We all know that the brain fills in patterns with its own expectations, so, for instance, only an extremely close reading of of this sentence would reveal the typographical error in it. Since most readers here know well the paradox of light as wave vs. light as particle, someone reading in the interest of genuinely sharing ideas does not notice that their brain substitutes in the correct word. That you noticed it does not, I think, indicate that only you read the post, but rather, that only you failed to actually read the post, and instead combed through it looking for nits to pick and trouble to make. With comments like these, I have a hard time justifying the belief that you comment here in good faith; you act more like a deliberate saboteur and, as I mentioned previously, a gadfly. I’d like to think better of you, but you make it difficult.
I think you know that you tortured the phrase out, “a typo manifested itself unto my conciousness,” far more than you had to (though you might not have noticed that you misspelled “consciousness”—do I alone read your comments?); for instance, “I saw a typo,” would work just as well, wouldn’t it?
I find nothing strange about the scientific example of light, but then, I also don’t share Willem’s flat rejection of science. I find it quite telling that, beginning from an avowedly objectivist, dualistic perspective in the philosophy of Descartes, that modern science across the board, from neurobiology (see the work of Antonio D’Amasio) to physics (as discussed here) has illustrated how, pursuing Aristotelean and Cartesian logic to their natural ends, we find them skewered on their own swords. It took us several centuries to follow the paths around, but I think we can now see that this perspective ultimately contradicts itself. Science (at least as we know it) eats itself.
I find your comparison to the novelty novel, Gadsby, particularly galling. You ask:
If it only did that, I would still call it crucial, since we certainly need to keep such a humility in mind as often as possible, but in fact, many novel insights have followed from this, and here, I think, the work of Dan Moonhawk Alford provides us with some fascinating examples, such as in his two complementary sets of notes, “God is Not a Noun in Native America,” and “God is a Verb,” where he introduces us to a reasonable argument against logic, and the argument that other languages could give rise to other logics (which reminds me of the etymological root for the word logic in the Greek for “word,” suggesting that the word told us all along that we had just taken some word games far too seriously all this time). Alford’s report of a conference that brought together quantum physicists and linguists studying American Indian languages mentions the novel insight of the quantum physicists there that the near-impenetrability of their field of study had little to do with any inherent difficulty, and everything to do with its fundamental challenge to our prevailing perspective, enforced by our noun-based language. To my mind, such things clearly count not just as novel insights, but some of the most novel, most insightful, insights that we have seen for quite some time—probably since Plato began unraveling the implications of the written word in the first place, and extrapolating them to create our current perspective of ourselves and the world in which we dwell.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 March 2008 @ 5:02 PM
Interesting article. I’ve looked at e-prime before but never in this light. Thanks.
Comment by Pat Logan — 20 March 2008 @ 9:51 PM
Thanks. Maybe I’m a rapturist, maybe is is is I’m enchanted by the whole story. I’ve read your posts, Jason, for a long time. I hope you realize that your influence extends far beyond this community of dozens, and don’t feel too antagonized. Your ideas speak. Lurkers lurk. Urban Scout, and Willem, I really enjoyed this one in particular.
“I’m good.” What does this say? Is there an equivalent in e-prime? I think it’s funny that conversation boils, in a way, down to simple acknowledgment of one another’s presence. How do we overcome this? Do we say more, or do we ask less?
This end of the world thing, it’s very niche. I feel better when I bird, when I stroll, hunt, sit around a fire. But it’s still as much of a future dream as a distant memory. Somebody brought up the example of Gadsby in this thread. It was tactless, maybe, in the context, but not irrelevant. I feel a profound disconnect, and when I act the way I want it’s as awkward and strange as not using the letter e.
I’m graduating college and gearing up to sit in a cubicle with no end in sight (except the one). Has anyone in this community come to terms with how sad this whole thing is, I mean, win lose or draw?
Is anticipation our only advantage? Does it come at the expense of our erstwhile happiness? How big of an advantage is it?
Comment by keith — 23 March 2008 @ 3:51 AM
Thanks, Keith. Myself, I can’t imagine spending my life in a cubicle. I can accept it as a temporary bridge, but if I really thought I’d still sit in a cubicle all day for the rest of my life, I’d kill myself. I mean that in all seriousness—why go through the daily horrors of civilization only to continue going through them for the rest of your life? We have more than just anticipation; as others have so often pointed out, we’d rewild whether collapse loomed or not, because we can’t stand dedicating our lives to the destruction of so much life. Collapse doesn’t even provide us a push out the door. Mostly, it provides an opportunity, a reason why we can hope to succeed at rewilding while all our predecessors have failed, not because of our own superior abilities, but because of our timing.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 23 March 2008 @ 9:10 AM
I pull away different ideas from this site at different times, and last night that was a sort of drunk-dial, a pretty dismal habit of mine (in fact I wouldn’t be offended, instead relieved, if you deleted my comment altogether, if you could find the time). I guess it goes to show how easily I get caught up and forget, imagining only the horrors and this inertia.
If I had truly internalized a message I now read into this article, I don’t think I’d have worried so much. I convince myself that the future will be this or that, but the way I experience the world has such little in common with those assignments. And yet I agonize over the map, never giving the territory itself a second glance. The emotional reactions that damn map stirs up in me… I almost want to laugh.
Just to relate something, I picked up this book “drawing with the right side of the brain,” a pretty decent how-to book, and there’s a chapter about artistic development in society and why children stop learning how to draw usually at age 8 or so. As I understood one reason, many civilized children develop symbols for things and draw them the same way every time at a certain point. “This is a smile, these are eyes, and this whole thing is a smiling face.” That sort of thing. Hands are always the same, clouds always the same. Many begin to perceive the world that way, foregoing observation of the way things look for the rote recognition of what things are. Overcoming this is the major step in learning how to draw well, according to the author. Perhaps for a mind without “to be,” artistic talent would flourish in addition to observations becoming much more keen.
Comment by keith — 23 March 2008 @ 4:54 PM
I view language basically as a game of 2nd order constructs, that at best reflects some sort of experience, sometimes very poorly, sometimes eloquently.
I have found that language has far more power than I may have thought when I was younger, even if it’s still
just a subjective ‘true enough for one’s purposes’ mode, that regardless of how its presented, never truly captures the phenomenological nature of life.
Comment by Bubba — 29 March 2008 @ 10:48 AM
I think you need to take a second look at language then, Bubba. That certainly fits with the way linguists like to portray it, but really, language drives straight into our participation with the world. You should definitely read David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous. The very fact that we can consider such direct engagement “second order” speaks volumes to just how far removed from our own senses we’ve become.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 29 March 2008 @ 11:20 AM
Well… maybe.
I still get a creepy feeling from my e-prime radar when I try to use the non “to be” copulas in e-prime. “Feel” doesn’t tip the scales for me because it expresses sensuality better than the others. “Seem”, though, feels like a total cheat more often than not for me mostly because it tends to imply an elliptical “to be”. Like “You seem upset” basically just makes an equation “You = upset” because the “seem” implies a “to be”. You could just as easily say “You seem to be upset” and express exactly the same sentiment which indicates why I don’t like to use it in that fashion.
“Get” works really well for expressing passive voice sometimes. Like “I got wasted last night” as opposed to “I was wasted last night” as opposed to even the non-passive “That whisky wasted me last night.” Sometimes you really just don’t want to put the focus on the doer of the action, and sometimes you may not know the doer. I find I can generally use “get” for those situations.
I have mixed feelings about “become”. While on one hand it definitely expresses transformation (in fact, you could replace it with the phrase “transform into” without altering the meaning much — it will just make it sound awkward) and that makes it feel like it doesn’t violate the idea of e-prime. However, both “become” and “transform into” really do make an equation, they just temper it with time. To say “I was a temp, and then I became a permanent employee” expresses an equation with both verbs. Just because the second verb (become) happens temporally later doesn’t mean that it doesn’t commit the Bourland lie as well.
I think I have to come close to fully siding with the wikipedia article on the copula that “E-Prime is a variant of the English language that prohibits the use of the copula in all its forms.”
Comment by wilderix — 31 March 2008 @ 3:26 PM
While I don’t exactly disagree, I think “seem” comes across a lot softer than “is”. To me “You seem upset” implies “I sense upsetness in you” or “I feel/think that you feel upset” not “You are upset”. “Seems” indicates perception much more than “is” does.
When you use “get” in your examples the word substitutes for “become” and acts as the copula. Thinking literally, you did not “get wasted” which implies retrieving a physical thing, you “became wasted” or you “experienced drunkenness”. Claiming that you avoid the copula by substituting an equivalent seems disingenous.
I do not study linguistics and I do not have much experience with e-prime. However, writing just this post has required me to pay very close attention to the words I use.
Noticing this, I also notice that I can eliminate the “to be” in many cases without a change in meaning. I wonder if this violates the spirit of e-prime. I also wonder if this is using the “zero copula”, however, most of the time it appears to replace the passive voice so perhaps not.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 31 March 2008 @ 4:01 PM
Bourland has written elsewhere about how people will sometimes use technically E-Prime language without the verb “to be,” yet violate the very spirit of E-Prime you refer to, Jim; while others sometimes use the verb “to be,” while clearly staying true to that spirit, nonetheless. I wish I understood it all well enough to illustrate.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 March 2008 @ 4:28 PM
Touche. You have given me more to think about regarding the copula, JimFive. I appreciate that.
I like it more now that you described it that way. I’ll think on this one some more too.
Wherein lies the value of e-prime for me. I don’t necessarily expect to forge a new culture that arises out of an English language lacking the verb “to be”. But I do hope to retrain my mind to notice the lies inherent in a culture that did arise with the verb “to be”.
The term “zero copula” refers to an implied copula. Basically, you just drop the linking verb out of a sentence that would normally have one. Like “You going to the party?”
Some languages do this as a matter of course, like Russian where they have spoken without the verb “to be” for so long that they don’t even remember how to conjugate it. They only use it for emphasis, but when they do use it, they tend to just say “to be” instead of the proper form. For example, you would normally say “I student” to express the phrase we typically render as “I am a student” in English (they also don’t use articles.) But if you wanted to emphasis the fact that you are a student now (as opposed to having been a student in the past,) you would say “I be student” because nobody remembers how to conjugate that verb anymore. And if you did conjugate it, you would either sound like a pretentious snob or a foreigner. But either way, you would still violate the spirit of e-prime.
This discussion makes me feel that the whole usage of predicate adjectives and predicate nominatives really violates e-prime to some degree. Sure we can use milder copulas that imply sensuousness while they make an equation, but our cultural and linguistic nature rests in trying to make equations.
I imagine that the progressive and continuous tense would fall into the latter category. We don’t really make an equation when we say “I am telling a story.” We simply mean to inject a feeling into the verb that implies a present action that will continue for some undetermined amount of time. Unfortunately, English feels exceedingly clunky when you try to express that feeling of progressive or continuous action in any other way.
Willem has stated over in the rewild.info forums that we should not fear clunkiness, rather embrace it…
…however the progressive tenses really sounds clunk far clunkier than most e-prime clunkiness. I continue to use it in my blog writing when I can’t find a better way to express what I want to, but it still just feels too jargony to me.
Willem suggested using an alternative verb like “sit” or “stand” to replace “to be” which I have tried to embrace, but it still has a much more foreign feel than most e-prime constructions. Needless to say, I sit on the fence right now over the progressive tense issue.
Comment by wilderix — 1 April 2008 @ 10:51 AM
Me:
WildRix:
Certainly, I meant that in response to Shane’s comment about “novel insight”. More explicitly, the value of e-prime lies in the fact that using it forces intentionality onto the speaker.
And also the future tenses: “I am going to go to the store.” “I will be telling a story.”
In French the progressive tense doesn’t seem to exist. J’etudie means both “I study” or “I am studying” and the near future uses go, just like english so “Je vais aller a la magasin.” literally translates to “I go to go to the store”. Both of these examples indicate to me that the “be” form is not really the copula but a different grammatical construct that happens to use the same token.
So, what is the E-prime recommendation for these tenses?
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 3 April 2008 @ 3:07 PM
Ah, to be or not to be. That may be the question, but let’s not suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous logic. Of course, any article that simply throws out gems like, “we hate most scientists and scientific inquiry” without any explanation, as though this is a generally agreed upon way of thinking, should probably be taken with a grain of salt. But that little bout of random insanity notwithstanding, it seems to me that this “E-Primitive” really just takes the weakest arguments for E-prime and adds to them some poorly chosen examples and more than a bit of that hip counter-cultural elitism that seems so popular on the internet these days.
Take, for instance, the sentence, “a group of scientists studying quantum physics began to realize that ‘to be’ and a lot of English does not reflect the nature of the universe.” Now for someone with a somewhat disturbing, inexplicable hatred of scientists, the author seems to have few qualms about using their perceived authority to his advantage. The wording here is more than a little misleading. It makes it sound as though E-prime is a naturally-occurring phenomenon that scientists just discovered in the laboratory one day. As though it’s a scientific fact, backed up with hard, empirical data, the linguistic equivalent of Einstein’s theory of relativity. When the truth is that E-prime is a purely semantic system aimed simply at improving accuracy in language.
But then there’s the assertion that, “‘To be’ supposes that the world never changes, but remains in a fixed state.” It’s the sort of line that only really works if one is completely oblivious to forms of the verb denoting tense, such as “was” or “will be.” Which means that if I say to you, “I am hungry,” rather than assuming it to mean that I am hungry at this particular point in time, you believe that I’m forever trapped in some Tantalean nightmare existence of eternal starvation. But then, if that’s really enough to throw you, you probably have bigger problems on your hands than what verb to use, like that bothersome habit of putting random objects in your mouth or trying to communicate with mirrors because you think there’s another person in there.
Obviously, the above example is absurd because most people are smart enough to figure out something’s context in time and space without having it specifically spelled out for them. As with everything, context is key. Which is true even for the most problematic uses of “to be.” Take, for instance, the example, “X is evil.” This could more accurately be phased as, “X exhibits a pattern of behavior that more often than not fails to conform to standards of ethical conduct.” But then, in the time it took you to spit that out, you could have caught a bus ride home, made yourself a nice dinner, and kicked back to watch the entire Star Wars trilogy. In this case, “is” simply provides a form of verbal shorthand. Which is why E-prime is not, in fact, simpler than using “to be,” as previously claimed in this thread. Even though it includes fewer words in its total vocabulary, the words that E-prime excludes are ones that are used specifically for simplification. Being that the entire point of language is to communicate ideas, if it’s possible to convey the same meaning with three words instead of twenty, why wouldn’t you? Any person who is willing to sacrifice clarity for the sake of making a philosophical point clearly has his head stuck so far up his own ass that verbal communication is no longer an issue.
And the other side of the coin is that the very same problems that “to be” gives us in the above example can just as well arise in E-prime. James French, a programmer at the University of California, makes the case quite clearly (PDF): “A statement such as, ‘The practice of E-Prime is silly,’ has a tell-tale form and can be easily recognized by general semanticists as having the structure of identity (or predication). Yet, a statement of apparently equal identification, ‘The silly practice of E-Prime continues,’ can be made in E-Prime without the verb ‘to be.’ The latter form may even hold more dangers. Since the E-Prime statement assumes an identity rather than asserting it, our ability to recognize it as a problem is hampered.”
And of course, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the article’s tangent into the issue of factuality. The author writes, “A common defense of the concept of ‘fact’ goes, ‘Well, it’s a fact that the sun will rise tomorrow. That we know.’” Except, of course, that this is merely a straw man argument. The “fact” that the sun will rise tomorrow isn’t really a fact at all. It’s more what we call an induction. Granted, it’s an induction with an incredibly high probability of being true. But probability, being the stubborn little bastard that it is, is never 100%. You always have to leave that tiny window open for the possibility that during the night the sun will be swallowed by a black hole or destroyed by an alien death star or some other such nuisance. On the other hand, if I were to say, “The sun rose today,” that would be a fact. It’s already happened. I can point to it and say, “Look. There’s the sun.” And you can try to worm your way out of it with your culural relativist nonsense all you want, but it still doesn’t change the FACT that it’s the friggin’ sun and it’s RIGHT THERE.
Now don’t get me wrong. Going around the internet hating on blog posts isn’t all I’m about. I actually rather like the idea of E-prime as a concept. After all, anything that forces people to put more thought into what they’re saying is generally a good thing, in my opinion. And getting rid of those unnecessary to be’s does, more often than not, make language more interesting, which is why so many writers try to refrain from using the passive voice if they can avoid it. But the point where I have to take issue with all of this is when people start talking about it as though Bourland is the One and not using “to be” will restore order to the Martix. Now we’ve gotten off the highway to Somewhat-Interestingville at the exit to Crazytown. Yet the still unresolved question, for which this article provides no conclusive answer, is even if the English language causes us to think differently, so what? Language is constantly changing, but so far there’s been very little evidence to suggest that the changes that have been made in English are in any way maladaptive. It’s like Japanese people learning to speak English having trouble with their L’s. That doesn’t mean that either language is better or worse. Just different. And if your point here is to show that different cultures are, in fact, different, then congratulations. I guess you understand the term “to be” after all. You’ve now reached the level of cultural awareness of the average third grader.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a philosophy among this primitivist crowd that because certain aspects of civilized society are detrimental that anything it produces must be bad, regardless of whether or not such a claim has any evidence at all to back it up. As though our society is some sort of cultural James Bond villain. Which is odd because you’d think that with how many real problems we have, there wouldn’t be much of a need to invent new ones. But then, maybe that’s just me.
Comment by Jack Monday — 13 April 2008 @ 11:28 AM
Jack-
Well, you certainly seem to have had quite the conversation with yourself here.
I’ll address a couple things you said, but it doesn’t sound like you actually need me. 
E-prime thinking has encouraged me to only use examples that have actually occured. People have used this “sun rising” idea many times in conversation with me to rebut the notion of afactuality. By definition, this exempts it from the straw-man fallacy. I don’t think it makes sense either.
You make a lovely point, on the proper label for that statement.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t work either. You’ve made another induction. “I see the Sun in the sky, before I’ve seen it rise to that point, therefore it again must have gotten there by rising”.
A wonderful afactual, e-prime statement, if ever I’ve heard one. A statement of what you observe.
Whoah! Where did that come from? It sounds like this annoys you quite a bit. But you’ve demonstrated the problem of facts quite elegantly, even with your last sentence…the idea of facts really has more of an emotional basis, than a functional one.
Often we find it reassuring that things “are” the way they “are”, instead of a dynamic ocean of probability, mostly composed of empty space.
Ah well.
Comment by Willem — 14 April 2008 @ 10:22 PM
The language and culture will come on it’s own. Skills first.
You’re starting in the wrong end.
Comment by Torjus Gaaren — 15 April 2008 @ 10:09 AM
Sgëno, Jack,
Thank you for the time spent reading the article and drafting such a long, well-crafted response. I know how much time a comment like that can take, so I appreciate the amount of time, energy and consideration you’ve devoted to this. You obviously possess a keen wit, which makes it all the more disappointing that you dedicated it to a cutting reply, rather than considering what the article itself said.
In your own words, “