E-Prime, E-Primitive: A Look at English and Language of Place
How does our language affect us? Do indigenous people’s languages reflect their fundamentally different relationship to the world, as contrasted with cultures of modern civilizations?
If we wanted to change the way we speak, in order to reflect a more satisfying relationship with the Land around us, where might we start?
E-Prime, English without the verb “to be”, offers an approach.
E-Primitive takes it even farther, adding verbiness and other factors that deepen the observation and process-oriented perspective of the world around us.
This podcast clocks in at about 26 minutes.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Alright, Willem, you pronounce Alfred Korzybski’s name “Kor-zyb-ski”, not “Kor-zi-biz-ski”. Sigh.
April 25th, 2008 at 10:21 am
Some references:
Dan Moonhawk Alford’s web page, http://www.enformy.com/alford.htm
Alfred Korzybski, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
General Semantics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Semantics
April 29th, 2008 at 4:00 am
Hey Willem
I just wanted to thank you for your work on all this, having followed some of the early developments (as a lurker for the time being…) on the rewild site. I find all the territory opened up by this angle fascinating, although I had the usual (for me) initial ‘oh come on, you can’t be serious’ reaction that seems prevalent in the comment thread over on Anthropik currently. Interestingly I had the same reaction on first hearing about fox walking, but managed to get past that after a month-or-so’s resistance, and have been reaping the postural and sensual rewards ever since. I now take these bouts of indignant outrage as my first clue for interesting new avenues to explore.
Having had a few bad experiences with quasi Stalinist purges of words from my vocabulary in the past (largely through post-adolescent attempts to distance myself from previous religious persuasion - no more talk of ‘wrong or right’, ‘good or evil’ etc) - a potential pitfall I’m sure I don’t need to warn you about - I will mostly be following advice I heard from Dan, namely of installing programming-type ‘break points’ on the various forms of ‘to be’ in my speech and thought patterns, so that I trip and stumble, slowly getting better on all fronts at re-formulating my bald assertions of changeless essence.
Important IMO generally to keep an eye on the motive for these changes and watching out for the insidious influence of puritan thought police. So I like the lack of shame you exhibit in using ‘to be’ in speech, although I confess to a guilty pleasure in spotting when those little inconsistencies creep in
Only discovered the site recently, but like what I’ve read/seen/heard so far.
Ian
May 1st, 2008 at 9:30 pm
Great to have you Ian! Thanks for your comments. I agree…secular purtianism, american style, lurks behind every fad and self-help regimen. I too try to stay on my toes, alert against my inner puritans.
June 9th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
[…] to can Aristotle’s mistake. Willem Larsen has taken this concept much further and created E-Primitive. A version of E-prime that stresses verb-based sentences (among many other changes). Most […]