E-prime and other restricted grammars

["ralph (r.f.) calistro" <calistro -at- BNR -dot- CA>]

Marguerite Krupp wrote:

<I tend to lump initiatives like E-prime, Information Mapping,
<Caterpillar Basic English (or whatever its successors are called now),
<etc., with bra-burning and the novel that someone wrote without
<using the letter "e" at all.  They're all examples of an idea,
<good in itself, taken to an extreme to make a point.  Then it
<becomes something of a religion, and the point gets lost.


I feel obliged to respond to this note, and others like it
in recent posts, because the issue here is not E-prime as
such but all forms of controlled English, including
Simplified English, and I have been locally preaching the
need for some form of controlled English writing.

Perhaps we should ask what *point* these forms of controlled
English want to make.  The issue is English in an
international setting.  Caterpillar developed their
Basic English, which has become Caterpillar Technical
English (CTE), to produce documents in English for readers
whose first language is not English.  This was also the
motivating force behind the development of AECMA
Simplified English for the aircraft industry.

I am not arguing for any specific form of controlled
English.  I found interesting, however, the Caterpillar
information from last year's STC conference in Dallas,
especially their on-going development of an interlingua
for machine translation of CTE.

The issue that we really need to discuss is not
whether E-prime has merits.  We need, rather, to
discuss the requirements for writing documentation
in English that will either be translated or read
in its original form by someone whose first language
is not English.

I think that it may be time to start preparing
a proposal for next year's STC conference in
Washington, D.C.


Ralph F. Calistro, Ph.D.
Northern Telecom
Ottawa, Canada
calistro -at- bnr -dot- ca