mookestink

I present to you English Prime, or E-Prime.  It transforms the English language by removing every instance of the verb "to be" from discourse.  This includes being, was, is, will be, are, am, exists, becoming, et cetera.  It forces one to use stronger, more accurate words than "to be", otherwise known as both the most over-used and the vaguest concept in our language.

A poet would see the importance of eschewing over-utilized phrasing; nobody has improved upon the meaning and efficiency of Shakespeare's "to be or not to be".  Heidegger exhausted the concept of Being, and made a career, in "Being and Time".

Above and beyond the necessary changes one must make to write or speak in E-Prime resides one major concern.  Ontology, or the question of what it means to be, appears to lose the plot when you try to defend any ontological position in E-Prime.  We cannot say that something exists, so questions about whether or not a Deity exists have no relevance.  Instead, we need to limit ourselves to what appears.

A philosopher would understand how much is predicated on the verb "to be", and see that it requires many alterations to one's beliefs to speak E-Prime fluently.  For instance, we can not say that we believe in the existence of anything, as that is not a meaningful proposition.  Solipsism, the question of whether or not anything exists other than one's own mind, is similarly a question of existence, and thus irrelevant.  Truly, English Prime resolves old problems just as it engenders new ones.  Whether one should use Standard English versus E-Prime primarily manifests as an aesthetic concern.

Furthermore, questions about identity and predication depend on the verb "to be".  For instance, to proclaim that "whatever is, is" or that "all bachelors are unmarried men" both no longer express anything meaningful.  We don't assume that we know what it means for something to exist -- "is" and "are" clue us into the fact that both propositions remain inexpressible in E-Prime.  Descartes' famously efficient maxim, cogito ergo sum, no longer remains simple.  Expressing what the "sum" actually means challenges our common sense notions of "what existence is".

I find E-Prime fascinating, and have been playing with it for the last couple weeks.  I still have yet to find a way around the ontological conundrum, but would definitely like to hear from someone more clever than I.

Can we talk about God from the perspective of E-Prime?  Surely, we cannot ask "whether He exists", because "exists" has, as its fundamental identity, a form of the verb "to be".

As a starting point, I recommend the following essay by Robert Anton Wilson: https://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm