Rationale
Bourland and other advocates also suggest that use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of language that reduces the possibility of misunderstanding and/or conflict. Some languages already treat equivalents of the verb "to be" differently without obvious benefits to their speakers. For instance, Arabic lacks a verb form of "to be" in the present tense. If one wanted to assert, in Arabic, that an apple looks red, one would not literally say "the apple is red", but "the apple red". In other words, speakers can communicate the verb form of "to be", with its semantic advantages and disadvantages, even without the existence of the word itself. Thus they do not resolve the ambiguities that E-Prime seeks to alleviate without an additional rule, such as that all sentences must contain a verb. Similarly, the Ainu language consistently does not distinguish between "be" and "become"; thus ne means both "be" and "become", and pirka means "good", "be good", and "become good" equally. Many languages—for instance Japanese, Spanish, and Hebrew—already distinguish "existence"/"location" from "identity"/"predication".
E-Prime and Charles Kay Ogden's Basic English may lack compatibility because Basic English has a closed set of verbs, excluding verbs such as "become", "remain", and "equal" that E-Prime often uses to describe precise actions or states.
Alfred Korzybski criticized the use of the verb "to be", and stated that, "Any proposition containing the word 'is' creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies." However, he also justified the expression he coined — "the map is not the territory" — by saying that "the denial of identification (as in 'is not') has opposite neuro-linguistic effects on the brain from the assertion of identity (as in 'is')." Noam Chomsky, "egarded as the father of modern linguistics", commented on Korzybski's view:
Sometimes what we say can be misleading, sometimes not, depending on whether we are careful. If there's anything else, I don't see it. That was the conclusion of my undergrad papers 60 years ago. Reading Korzybski extensively, I couldn't find anything that was not either trivial or false. As for neuro-linguistic effects on the brain, nothing was known when he wrote and very little of that is relevant now.
Rewilding-advocate Urban Scout wrote his book "Rewild or Die" entirely in E-Prime. He states the rationale for this as follows:
“To be” prevents us from experiencing a shared reality; something we need in order to communicate in a sane way. If someone sees something completely different than another, our language prevents us from acknowledging the other's point of view by limiting our perception to fixed states. For example, if I say “Star Wars is a shitty movie,” and my friend says, “Star Wars is not a shitty movie!” We have no shared reality, for in our language, truth lies in only one of our statements and we can forever argue these truths until one of us writes a book and has more authority than the other. If on the other hand I say, “I hated Star Wars,” I state my opinion as observed through my own senses. I state a more accurate reality by not claiming that Star Wars “is” anything, as it could “be” anything to anyone.
Because they expose more assumptions, E-Prime statements invite challenge more readily than those made using the verb "to be". This is desirable according to philosopher John Ralston Saul who claims that a state of "permanent psychological discomfort" can serve as a prerequisite to, or even as equivalent to, consciousness itself.
Read more about this topic: E-Prime