Re: To be or not: An E-prime inquiry

[Andreas Ramos <andreas -at- NETCOM -dot- COM>]

Actually, the "novel without the letter e" was originally written in
French, which is a much greater challenge than in English. It was part of
the Olipo (sp?) literary movement of the 50's, 60's, and 70's. Georges
Perec, who wrote "Life: A User's Manual" ( translated from the French), if
i remember correctly also wrote the infamous novel-without-an-e. (Here's a
challenge:  eat a dinner of foods which don't have the letter e.) The
amazing thing about the French novel is that it was translated: that was a
real challenge.

Many of these movements (no greek/latin derivitives, no polysyllables,
etc.) stem from the Romanticist and neo-Nordic movements from the turn of
the century. Pound and Yeats felt very strongly about writing in English,
real English, without all of the imported foreign words. There was a bit
of reactionism involved; they were fashionably fascist and were looking
for an ursprache, an ur-expression. Anything Nordic was better. William
Carlos Williams is a modern version of the same movement. Clear English
is beautiful.

As someone else pointed out; most of our everyday words are made up of
stock English: farm, dog, mother, etc.  which are agricultual words. In
German, which is made up of ur-german words, it's much easier to be clear;
complex words are made up of simple, understandable words. Very few native
speakers of English understand the word "hermeneutics", but every german
understands "deutungswissenschaft"  (deutung=interpretation, wissen=to
know, schaft=skill, or field).

To abolish the verb "to be" however is rather bizarre; it goes to the
root (no pun intended) of civilization. Obviously the idea was due to an
engineer.

It does have its purpose: simple English is easier to understand. But we
also have many things for which the agricultural/military life of the last
10,000 years doesn't have a suitable word. Computer is an excellent
example: it's more suiting to call it a machine. Few of us use it to
compute.

The prefix "ur" itself is the name of the city Ur, which German
archeologists thought for many years to be the oldest city. It is in the
Iraqi Tigris/Euphrates area. American bombers successfully flattened it.

With tech writing, I try to write with as much English and as little
Greek/Latin as possible. It makes it easier to understand.

yrs,
andreas
_____________________________________________________________________________
Andreas Ramos, M.A. Heidelberg                         Sacramento, California