The English language, quite literally, came from nowhere. No native people spoke it, not even the English. It works as a conglomeration of languages, a mish-mash made for one purpose; trade. If languages provide us with a context with which to see the world, than English programs people to see the living world through the lens of exploitation: trees as dollar bills or animals as units of meat, humans as slaves. English tells us from the moment we utter our first word to our last that the world exists for one purpose; commerce.
By now you may notice something weird or different about my writing style that you can’t quite put your finger on. I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’ve written this book in E-Prime (or English Prime), a version of the English language that excludes the use of the verb “to be.” You heard me right. I do not use the words “is” “was” “am” “were” “be” “been” “are” or any of their contractions. Stop for a second and write a paragraph or two or three and see if you can write without using “to be.” Pretty hard, huh? Now just think how hard it would feel to write a whole book in it!
This story puts me to sleep every time I tell it, but here we go. E-prime came about because some very clever scientists realized that B-English (”regular english” that does not exclude “to be”) creates a false projection of reality. The world constantly changes and B-English interferes with this change by attending to fix reality in stone. Just like the culture of civilization that remains sedentary and resists the change of nature from our most basic action; subsistence (As discussed in Agriculture Vs. Rewilding). It seems only natural that a sedentary culture that resists change would eventually evolve a language that projects our perception of control into the natural world. We do it with the plow and we do it with our words.
Although the thought of particles, waves and electrons makes me kind of sick to my stomach, while doing who-knows-what-kind of experiments, quantum psychics nerds discovered that when measured with one instrument an electron appears as a wave and when measured with different instrument an electron appears as a particle (snore). We have a problem here; in Aristotelian B-English, an electron cannot “be” both a particle and a wave. As surely as a table cannot also “be” a chair. He realized that by “be-ing,” we label some thing as it “is” fixing it into an unchangeable object.
For example. I cannot simultaneously “be” both stupid and smart. But what happens when person A observes with a set of instruments (Person A’s senses) that I have intelligence, and person B observes through a different set of instruments (Person B’s senses), that I say idiotic things? Our linguistic world eats itself and arguments ensue. “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 others 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. Similarly one could say, “I’ve seen Urban Scout act like an idiot before,” while another person could say, “Man, Urban Scout has really made me think. I really appreciate him.” We have two perceptions that do not contradict one another, but came about from different perspectives.
“To Be” plays god. It attempts to chisel reality in stone and works as the backbone of the promoting the civilized paradigm. Of course it does, its birthplace in the land of economic commerce, not a biological community. English works to domesticate the world as much as tilling means to domesticate it. Every element of our culture urges for domestication, for slavery. Nothing could stand more fundamental, aside from the practice of agriculture itself, to this process of domestication than our own language, which shapes how we perceive the world.
Some people believe that language marked the beginnings of hierarchy and we should walk away from language as well. But where do you draw the line? At vocalization? Birds vocalize. Body language? Every animal uses body language. Every animal has a language. If I run from a bear it will chase me. If I stand my ground and avoid eye contact, I let the bear know I don’t mean harm. The bear will huff and gruff and bluff to test my stance. Eventually the bear will walk away and let me go. This confrontation has a language to it. Peaceful confrontations do as well. Birds use songs, companion calls and alarms to communicate, to emphasize their body language.
We know that indigenous peoples lived sustainably with spoken languages. We also know that no indigenous cultures had the verb “to be.” Knowing that, and what “to be” does to our perception of reality, it makes sense that the first step to rewild the English Language we need 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 indigenous languages based themselves in verbs rather than nouns. This shows us their focus on a fluid-ever-changing perception of reality. Our noun-based sentence structure shows us another symptom of our fixed-reality language.
E-Prime hardly fixes English (pardon the pun!). I know that. But it greatly de-fangs it. It tears down many of the languages footholds on control and allows for a more chaotic, changeable paradigm to fall into place. The more I write in e-prime the more I see how “is” takes control of the world and how fluid English can sound. Of course, I speak in B-english and write most of my other writings in it. I also have no illusions that E-prime could ever stop civilization from destroying the planet, rather, E-Prime works as a means of reconnecting yourself to the wild through language. It merely helps you to see the world through a more dynamic, accurate linguistic paradigm.
The English language, quite literally, came from nowhere. No native people spoke it, not even the English. It works as a conglomeration of languages, a mish-mash made for one purpose; trade
Actually, it evolved as a Germanic language from Anglo-Saxon, and the Norman French nobles infused a number of Latin-based words. Old and Middle English had far more words steeped in meaning than our modern form. All languages form as a blending and mutating version of previous language(s). It evolved during a period in which Latin and Greek were the primary trade languages. Modern English has become that language in today’s global commerce, though.
Otherwise, great essay.
Actually, your statements don’t contradict mine at all. Obviously it came from other languages, but as it became “english” it lost its sense of place, because you don’t need a sense of place to talk business. That’s my point. No native peoples spoke English as we speak it today. It does not come from any one place, any particular place; it has no connection to a landbase. Those who spoke the languages that gave birth to English may have had a closer connection to the land, but English itself comes from no place, nowhere.
That’s an interesting theory to look into. It’s something like an opposite, yet complimentary version of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis, which shows that cognition is limited by the language we use.
I dunno, I’d say that the English language changed as England did. Old English suited Angle-land pretty well, and when it became Norman England, it became a very different place, and the language changed with it. Chaucer’s Middle English kept up with the Later Middle Ages, and the modern English that came with King James & Shakespeare adapted with England as England became the hub of a global empire. I wouldn’t say it came from nowhere. Though, if you wanted to suggest that perhaps the genius loci of England has gone a bit insane with its own power and importance during the age of imperialism, and its language changed to reflect that, I think I might agree with that.
Um… Sure?
Yea, what he said.
At some point, I think a people detach from the sourcing “genius loci” of their place, and begin a process of building a landscape of mirrors reflecting human thought back onto human faces. This landscape made of human thought actually sits on top of and obscures the genius loci of the place; much like in my town, most folks I ask don’t know which way our river flows, or where the clouds come from. It certainly impacts them on some level, but mind focus has more impact than sensory stimulus.
Thus, I think when Urban Scout says “English came from nowhere”, he may mean “English came from the no-where, detached from place, landscape of human thought”.
I.e., no indigenous people, in intimate communication with the genius loci, as a culture, spoke the English language. Modern domesticated humans did, who live in a culture of domesticated ruts, streets, doorways, ideologies detached from place.
Does that make sense?
I certainly think that we can learn from our heritage, that this process works as a continuum from minimal obscuring of place (indigenous), to full obscuring of place (Coruscant, capital of the Republic of doodoo whatever in star wars). Not that we could ever fully obscure place…in any case we can go back to learn from our ancestors who, though somewhat domesticated, lived more in accord with the rhythms of nature, did value village and family life, etc.
I think honoring that tradition has a lot of importance, especially since only that frail umbilical cord connects us. After all, just like every domesticated person descends from a wild person, every domesticated language came from a real, wild, genius loci. I think if I live in England, I would look at English as a domesticated language that I had to rewild back to the land it came from. To say that English came from nowhere denies the process by which the indigenous language of the land became domesticated, and simply accepts domestication’s own mythology that it always existed. Well, if we give up on the language so easily, shouldn’t we just as easily give up on ourselves? So it seems to me that we really can’t just let go of English and just resign it to the intrinsically rotten; it once blossomed out of the land and bore fruit. Understanding how it rotted from that into its current state also tells us how we rotted along with it, and if we can’t keep that in mind, then I don’t see much hope for us to rewild, either.
Speaking of genius, Willem is one. I bow. I sure hope I have a chance to caffeinate with you and Scout someday.
Jason, what about the countless numbers of people upon which English was imposed, including my own? I have Tslagi and French ancestry, primarily, with the odd other ethnicity thrown in (my grandfather, who spoke fluent Cajun, had a German mother who also did, but who obviously came from people who didn’t). I bristle every time I run into the English First movement because *I* don’t have English ancestry. WTF is all this crazy talk in America about “speaking the language of our historical origins”? MY origins are in France and North America, NOT England.
And the changeover to English-speaking happened in the generation before mine. When my maternal grandmother dies there will be no one left in my mother’s immediate family for whom French of any variety was the mother tongue. And this has had a serious effect on our culture, right down to our thoughts. I’m French, but I think in English. And since my father completed the process of assimilating our family by joining the Navy and taking himself and us away from our homeland, even my family’s accents sound foreign.
Part of the domestication process is cutting us off from our roots, even when those roots arose partly from civilization. And it should be noted that as with many peoples who are forced to live close to the land because of poverty, my people might have eventually rewilded themselves to live in harmony with the land in the long run, before the English-speakers intervened.
I view the Anglophone world as the fucking Borg. If they want to rewild the language in England proper, great. But because the language was imposed on my people and it’s the only one in which I can think… I don’t know, is it possible in the process of rewilding to abandon domesticated language well beyond the verb “to be”? Because I’d really like to do that.
Oh, here’s another thought: You know how you can use “to be” as a sort of helping verb? I forget the exact term. I was just using this in a conversation, in the phrase “when you’ve been rejected…” When you add “to be” to another verb you turn it into a passive verb. Something’s been done to you, but no one is responsible for it, it just happened. This is a fairly serious problem when people are talking about political situations in particular. For instance, if you say a woman’s “been raped,” nobody did it–the man’s not guilty. When you say “the man raped the woman” it’s a lot more honest but certain parties view it as threatening. Just food for thought.
Dana, do you perhaps mean passive voice?
Sorry, but your post is bollocks, and I should know.
From your very first sentence, you attempt to “fix reality in stone” by making a definite assertion - that the English language “came from nowhere”.
I might argue that it did come from somewhere, and there we are, right back in your “Star Wars is/isn’t shitty” dilemma.
In fact, your whole post is full of these arguable, binary oppositions.
E-English appears to me nothing more than an exercise in unnecessary circumlocution.
Of course, I meant “E-Prime”, not “E-English”. :-S
I love articles about E-prime. Actually, I like most any suggestions to improve the English language (One of my high-school English teachers would throw a fit if she heard someone using “get” in a sentence, and since then I’ve seen how much it obscures the meaning of a sentence - better to use one of its synonyms.)
as for what henry is saying…
i agree with the idea that objective statements can still be made, even if we avoid the verb “to be,” and that this presents some problems for people trying to re-wild language.
however, i think that maybe the idea behind e-prime is to make it easier for us to not fall into easy traps that often lead to objective thinking. for example, it’s much easier to make a rule saying “don’t use the verb ‘to be’” than to list all these specific sentence constructions that could turn out to be objective, because that requires more analysis. moreover, i think the “to be” rule is but one guideline in a number of other ones that would work. in the essay, urban scout mentioned something about focusing on verbs rather than nouns, which makes sense too. i think the point is to make easy guidelines to follow, things you can easily catch yourself doing, and then build up from there. i don’t think it was claimed that eprime would solve everything…
okay, i totally didn’t use eprime here… :S
i think at least my transitives ought to be okay tho