Your post has caught my attention! I will read Julian Joyce’s book, for definitely.

That fascinates me that ‘to be’ could originate from ‘to breathe’. It makes a lot of sense.

And I do see all language use as a kind of therapy - we simply point our tools in the direction of where we want to go.

If language interests you, you might want to hop on over to the College of Mythic Cartography. I almost never check messages here.

Anyway, I”m posting here because he asserts that the verb ‘to be’ originates in Sanskrit as ‘breathes’, and I wonder if anyone has thoughts on this or can verify/disprove this.

It seems to me that the verb ‘to be’ is only mechanically oppressive, that allowed to have it’s original metaphorical meeting, seems to me that E-prime could be repackaged as speech therapy to heal the language user, as opposed to the tool itself.

Given the original metaphorical stance of to be, it seems then therapy would be a more direct approach than patching bugs in software that has no intrinsic meaning anyway, except for what the user brings to that software (the English language). Very open source already, wouldn’t you agree, amigos?

I think another approach(given the veracity of this factoid), rather translation of the verb to be, could emerge if others see what I’m saying and we find it together to be true.

I feel like a type of communicative therapy approach to tackle human 2D patterning (this IS this, that IS that) would be a strong candidate to guide a person into deeper, systematic pattern processing.

That way, I can say something IS something and given that both the speaker and listener are using incorporative listening, speaking, and thinking techniques, they no longer have the assumption that when something IS said to be something, that it isn’t excluded from being other things, even contradictory to the original IS.

So as far as those multiplicities of tackling shallow meaning and understanding the difference between what a tree is and it’s is-ness is a life’s work in itself. So to differentiate from performing a tobe-dectomy, I see cognitive approaches changing the language user first, empowering the language user to open up meaning and conversation and other, and then, through cultural metaphor, vernacular and slag, then, language is rewritten.

To start an argument, I perceive a general philosophy above that changing the language first then changes the language user.

To make a what I think is a new point, please pardon my dichotomy, but hey, maybe it’ll be useful… maybe it will breathe usefulness Or give breath to utility…

I think the 7 steps above ink and ache towards what I’m talking about. But speaking of dichotomies, I don’t see any utility in seeing civilized (patchwork) language as opposite to animist languages. Those worked for me a long time ago when I needed an explanation as to why I needed saved. and I felt saved by realizing civilization was the root of my problems…but no longer do I find utility in comparing all other cultures to the amalgam we currently share and call ‘civilization’. Sumeria, that was a civilization. Organized. homogeneous. Planned. Controlled. Greatest Benefit to true few. Today you can be a billionaire or a politician, or celebrity but rarely are you more than one or two of these.(Gov. Schwarzenegger, Bill Gates, and Micheal Bloomberg being notable exceptions, but none are all three) We are Roman post-apocalyptic, for as far as I can tell. You to can BE a billionaire if you can allow yourself to plunge into the depths of humanity and invent the Snuggie, the 5-hour energy shot, or the ShamWOW… A civilization in it’s classical mechanical self, takes steps to prevent Snuggies from hitting the bazaar, and so on… Nazi Germany, National Socialism, is that last true attempt at civilization as we wonky fucks have come to know our dominant lifestyles we pathetically call culture. I rant because for me, then line isn’t so clear, everyone other culture and this one. In the beginning of my journey (read Ishmael in 1999), it was much easier and much more amazing to see how different we truly are from people with real culture and actual tradition. Today, I see so much in common with humans of all enculturations I’m more fascinated when I hear culture X had a great flood myth, too. I spend a lot of time cooperating in a smaller network within a non-cooperating larger network, and yes, I feel confined, but after looking at so many other real cultures I have hope that we’ve been on the road to undoing domination philosophies longer and more successful that I used to think. Me and my friends have changed so much and I am thankful for this time and place for this opportunity, five years ago, I would punch myself in the face for saying something like that. Learning gratitude has furthered my journey than any book or philosophy and cultural immersion. OF course, I live in Louisiana. Crawfish are crawling out of their holes. MY vegetable seedlings are sprouting to life. OF COURSE I’m delusionally optimistic, but down here in the teeming bayou, that’s just our way of life…

I’m sure if this emerging bud of realization flowers, we’ll find a way to incorporate everything into the meadowscape. Cause I like metaphors. I like them as much as I like fresh baked cookies. and I like understanding how IS-ness can be poison without a broader perspective.

So what are people’s thoughts on the language user challenging themselves to re-understand first, and leaving the mechanics of the language to time and popular usage? (again I apologize for the crap model here)

To start out, I’ll explain my stance. I do agree that cutting down on the verb “to be” often makes sentences more clear and more active. However, I don’t think that people should ditch the verb entirely. “To be” tends to make sentences wordier, just because in order to use it you mention two ideas and equate them, rather than mention one idea and elaborate on it. The clarity gained in taking the latter approach is commendable. However, it’s not the gold standard for communication: it’s just one way of writing a sentence. In the same way, sometimes one idea will call for a different sentence pattern than another will. Ernest Hemingway made great use of the contrast between long and short sentences. Most people use whatever size sentence comes to their head first, and similarly they use “to be” whenever the idea they’re expressing seems to call for it. Better communication can involve a conscious decision to cut down on “to be”, but in certain cases that verb is the most effective way to express an idea, and abandoning it completely makes little sense.

I do think you have a good point with re-verbing nouns, and I enjoy your story about Giuliana and whether she can consider herself a writer. Looking for the verb that parented a noun can make thinking clearer, and more direct. This proposal struck somewhat of a chord with me, and I think I’ll start re-verbing nouns somewhat in the future. However, our world will always be a world of things. As was discussed in a Rewild conversation, even if you re-verb, you end up with nouns. Now, you could boil a sentence down to pronouns - for example, “I used a wolf hide to line my parka” could become “I used an it-hunts-in-(they-stay-together)s’s it-keeps-one’s-(they-do-bodily-functions)-from-falling-out to line my it-keeps-one-warm.” However, boiling everything down to pronouns like that clearly takes too much thought and time to be practical. Nouns are a natural shorthand, and making them all verbs won’t work entirely. Doubtless you already knew that, and also know that re-verbing is more of an exercise to make some nouns a bit more clearer, and make identities less rigid. I just want to point out that re-verbing has a limit to its usefulness.

I was thinking about the idea that using “to be” tells a little bit of a lie every time. I’ll continue the previous line of conversation that mentioned the rising sun. Now, it’s true that the only thing you can mention with absolute certainty is what your senses have informed you of. Thus, saying “The sun is in the sky” represents an induction from the original thought, “I see the sun in the sky.” However, it’s not just the verb “to be” that represents this kind of induction. Far from it, in fact: every single verb in English that doesn’t mention your senses in some way represents an induction from a thought that does mention your sentence. So, “He made a bowdrill” is necessarily an induction from “I saw him making something that looks to me like a bowdrill.” And “She walked to work” originally was “I heard a voice that I presume belongs to someone, telling me that she walked to work.” If you’re interested in absolute truth, ditching “to be” isn’t enough; all your sentences have to follow the approximate structure of Descartes’s classic “I think, therefore I [exist]”. If you’re interested in conveying information, as most people who use language are, you have to lose that framework in favor of something more useful and time-efficient.

In conclusion: using “to be” less will make your communication more direct and concise. Using “to be” not at all will make your communication more forced and difficult, and make it take longer. The trick is to use it just enough.

Cheers!

P.S. I’ve joined the Rewild forum: Number3Pencils.

Does this make sense?

No

I thought that I would write about something completely different today.
There is a whole movement, or sub culture amongst us that believes in “rewilding” ourselves and our ways of life to a more natural and primitive form.
This has to do …

I have to say, it boggles my mind as to why you’d waste your time in this way, if you see it as such. At least Torjus and gunnix kept their declarations of disinterest concise.

That said, here are a few more points for your consideration:

E-prime thinking has encouraged me to only use examples that have actually occured.

I realize you think this is a terribly powerful statement in support of E-prime thinking. But in my own personal experience, an inability to consider abstract concepts, future possibilities, or hypothetical situations has been one particular checkmark that always falls solidly in the “con” category.

People have used this “sun rising” idea many times in conversation with me to rebut the notion of afactuality. By definition, this exempts it from the straw-man fallacy.

Actually, “by definition,” it still is a staw man fallacy, the definition being, “The author attacks an argument which is different from, and usually weaker than, the opposition’s best argument.” You may have proven your opponent wrong, but neither of you were actually talking about factuality to begin with. And the fact that these people you spoke to thought they were providing a solid case does not make your own argument any less fallacious.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work either. You’ve made another induction. “I see the Sun in the sky, before I’ve seen it rise to that point, therefore it again must have gotten there by rising.”

That’s not really an example of inductive reasoning so much as it is an understanding of the definition of the word “rise.” Unless of course, and I assume this is where you’re going here, your point is to call into question the reliability of our senses themselves. And sure, it’s possible that nothing I’m seeing is actually real. I could just be a brain in some jar of formaldehyde that’s plugged into the Matrix. Yes, I know I already did a Matrix reference in my last comment. But shut up. I’m trying to make a point here. And the point is that this idea, while it may be interesting to consider from a ninth-grade stoner level of philosophical depth, ultimately isn’t terribly helpful. Similarly, you could also argue that the sun technically doesn’t rise at all. It’s merely the Earth revolving around the sun. But now you’re just being purposely difficult. You know full well what a person means when he says that the sun has risen, and the only reason to pretend otherwise is out of some desperate need for attention. So if it will make you feel better, I’ll admit that you’re smart, and we’re all terribly impressed. There. Now we can move on.

But here’s the real question. You say that using “to be” is the same as telling a lie. Well, who’s being more dishonest here? The person pretending not to know something that he honestly does know in order to make an irrelevent philosophical point or the person who just says, “The sun is rising?”

How could you “be” hungry? Do I feel you in my stomach ever time I hunger? You’ve become the avatar of hunger, the incarnation of appetite? Obviously not. You mean that you hunger, not that you “are” hungry. We all know that you lied to us with your statement, and we can generally accept such an innocuous deceit and sloppy use of language.

Except, of course, that “being hungry” means exactly the same bloody thing as to “feel hunger.” That’s the glory of the adverb there. “Hungry” is not the same as “hunger.” That’s why they’re two different words.

Does any of this matter? I would say it absolutely does, and here we get to the reason Willem invoked scientists, and quantum theory in particular. English speakers find quantum physics almost completely incomprehensible. Only the most brilliant English speakers can really understand quantum physics, though many more pretend to, or even earnestly believe that they do. Yet, for native speakers, quantum mechanics comes much more easily (see this report on a conference of quantum physicists and native speakers, previously offered upthread).

I suppose I’ll just hand you the benefit of the rather enormous doubt for the time being and assume that your interpretation is correct. And why not? After all, use of the word “to be” must be the deciding factor here because, as we all know, that is the one and only difference between native cultures and English-speaking cultures. Which is why, of course, Russia and the Arab world, whose languages also lack forms of the verb “to be,” are so far ahead of the United States in the areas of physics and engineering, right?

My wife constantly worries and agonizes over whether she can call herself a “writer.” In E-Prime, this problem does not exist.

Doesn’t exist? All right, now we’re just getting carried away with ourselves. Are you seriously suggesting that other cultures don’t have questions about personal identity simply because they may phrase the question differently? If so, what you’re describing isn’t so much a different culture as it is a different species.

Don’t get me wrong. Your ideas on the consequences of using the verb “to be” are interesting. But in the end, that’s all they are. It’s just food for thought really. Maybe not even actual food. More like pixie sticks for thought. They’re sweet and give you a nice sugar rush but are, ultimately, unfilling.

It’s just like Aristotle. He once thought that frogs are born from mud. And it all made perfectly logical sense given what they knew at the time. After all, you never see a frog giving birth to another frog or a frog hatching from an egg. The first time you ever see something that’s fully identifiable as a frog is when it’s crawling out of the mud. Of course, what we know now that Aristotle didn’t is that frogs are amphibious, starting off their lives as tadpoles.

And that’s just the problem when you try to philosiphize about natural phenomena. Your interpretation of the facts may be compelling, but without any kind of proof, a good idea is all it really is. And in the end, that’s what this argument boils down to. You can’t prove that your interpretation is right, and I can’t prove that it’s wrong. So this whole thing is just a colossal waste of time except for, as I mentioned above, an exercise in intellectual masturbation.

And as if to punctuate my point, I would like to bring your attention to Jason’s response to Torjus, who I thought actually made a rather good point. Yet Jason responds to a 17-word comment with a 1,000+ word post. Something just seems vaguely wrong with that.