Salutations,
I go by Andrew or Nodal Nim, & I have just come across this forum thanks to a link from a friend [friend -> E-Primitive ‘he-inspires-me’]. I find myself quite intrigued by what I’ve read so far.
I have many things to say about E-Prime (which I have used in writing for a while & have just started learning to speak) but I will save that. Instead, I would like to share with you what I did at work today.
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Work for me means walking dogs, lots of them, in th city of Chicago. Their owners want them to get out to “do their business” during th day but spend their time making money elsewhere. So they give some of that money to their dog-walker to keep their animals reasonably entertained & their floor clear of poo.
Before leaving to walk my first dog, I spent some time reading on this forum about E-Primitive. I get th idea that it works like this: an ordinary sentence in English contains nouns: dull, lifeless labels for entities that we observe. Nouns tell us classification, what something “is” (whether or not we say “This is a. . .”). Nouns do not necessarily reflect what th entities they refer to “do”. Do all teachers really teach? Do all people who teach receive th label of teacher?
In contrast, in an animistic culture, we have something more like descriptions of what a thing “does.” We wouldn’t say “She is a teacher,” but “She teaches” (& then only if we observe her teaching). This brings up th question of which holds more importance, th label our culture automatically assigns to a thing, or what we experience that thing doing. In my opinion, E-Prime leads us toward th latter, & E-Primitive even more so.
Willem, as you have introduced this idea, I’d especially love to hear your response, corrections, or clarifications of what I just tried to explain.
Anyway, as I walked my dogs today, I couldn’t help but try to come up with brand new E-Primitive names for my dogs based on my experiences with them. I will tell you some of them:
He-tumbles; She-gentles; She-teaches; He-attracts; He-protects.
Those five have a very simple structure. (Note my verbing of ‘gentle’. It seemed best.) Some slightly more complicated ones:
She-goes-cautiously; He-eats-snow; She-sniffs-intently; He-marks[-territory].
That last one could go He-marks-territory or just He-marks for short. It brings a new connotation to th name Mark, doesn’t it? My most complicated name:
She-thwacks[-her tail[-against th wall/fridge]]
So her long names go She-thwacks-her-tail-against-th-wall & She-thwacks-her-tail-against-th-fridge. A medium-length name goes She-thwacks-her-tail, & of course, we can just call her She-thwacks for short.
Do you think these types of names fit with th spirit of E-Primitive? I would like to hear anyone & everyone’s thoughts on this!
I found that I really enjoyed renaming these animals. It gave me a greater sense of closeness to them, since their names reflected how I felt they related to me. I talk to my dogs a lot (shamelessly), & I found that when I used these names with them, I would frequently say things like, “Oh, He-tumbles, I love you!” Somehow, it seemed more intimate.
I have not tried doing this with humans.
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I thought of something else. These names do not always reflect phenomenological observation. When th snow melts, will it still make sense to call a dog He-eats-snow? What if, when he becomes older, he stops eating snow altogether? Th name no longer corresponds to an observation, so should we do away with it?
I would suspect that cultures that name in this way have mechanisms in their language that allow this kind of flexibility, to keep th language up-to-date with changes in th environment. This would contrast with th sedentary nature of English, where we only recognize a word if an authority has written it down in a dictionary. Most people do not consider it their place to “create” new names for things.
What do you think?
