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E-Prime arose from Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics and his observation that English speakers most often use "to be" to express dogmatic beliefs or assumptions or to avoid expressing opinions and feelings as such.

The verb can express several distinct meanings:

• identity, of the form "noun be noun" [The cat is an animal]
• predication, of the form "noun be adjective" [The cat is furry]
• auxiliary, of the form "noun be verb" [The cat is sleeping]
• existence, of the form "noun be" [There is a cat]
• location, of the form "noun be place" [The cat is on the mat]

Bourland sees specifically the "identity" and "predication" forms as pernicious, but advocates eliminating all forms for the sake of simplicity. In the case of the "existence" form (and less idiomatically, the "location" form), one can simply substitute the verb "exists".

Note also that the elimination of "to be" implicitly eliminates the passive voice and progressive aspect [(following neutral?), which may explain part of the difficulty of some people when learning to use E-Prime.

Its advocates assert that the use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of writing that reduces the possibility for misunderstanding and conflict. Detractors might observe that some languages already treat the word very differently without giving any obvious advantages to their speakers. For instance, Arabic, like Russian, already lacks a verb form of "to be" or "is" in the present tense. If one wanted to assert, in Arabic, that "an apple is red", one would not literally say "the apple looks red", but "the apple red". That is, speakers can communicate the verb form of "to be" even without the existence of the word itself. 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 is not compatible with C. K. Ogden's Basic English because Basic English has a closed set of verbs that does not include the verbs such as "become", "remain", and "equal" that E-Prime uses to express states of "being". The changes also may eliminate enough ways to express aspect in African American Vernacular English to prove unworkable.

1 Prohibited words

To be is an irregular verb in English; some individuals, especially those for whom English is a second language, may have difficulty recognizing all its forms. In addition, speakers of colloquial English frequently contractIn linguistics, a contraction is the formation of a new word from two or more individual words. In English, contractions are usually either negations or combinations of pronouns with auxiliary verbs, and always include an apostrophe. Negations are general to be after pronounIn linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word that usually takes the place of a noun previously mentioned, such as "I", "me", "she", "it", and so on. Pronouns are one of the basic parts of speech, along with nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. A prons or before the word notNegation in its most basic sense, changes the truth value of a statement to its opposite. It is an operation needed chiefly in logic, mathematics, and grammar. Logic and mathematics In logic, logical negation is a unary logical operator that reverses the. E-Prime prohibits the following words as forms of to be:

• be
• being
• been
• am
• is; isn't
• are; aren't
• was; wasn't
• were; weren't
• ContractionsIn linguistics, a contraction is the formation of a new word from two or more individual words. In English, contractions are usually either negations or combinations of pronouns with auxiliary verbs, and always include an apostrophe. Negations are general formed from a pronounIn linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word that usually takes the place of a noun previously mentioned, such as "I", "me", "she", "it", and so on. Pronouns are one of the basic parts of speech, along with nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. A pron and a conjugationIn linguistics, grammatical conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from the word root by inflection (regular alteration according to rules of grammar). Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, mood, voice, grammatical of to be:
  • I'm
  • you're; we're; they're
  • he's; she's; it's (when derived from it is)
• E-Prime likewise prohibits contractions of to be found in nonstandard dialectA dialect is a variant, or variety, of a language spoken in a certain geographical area. The number of speakers, and the area itself, can be of arbitrary size. It follows that a dialect for a larger area can contain plenty of (sub-) dialects, which in turs of English, such as the following:
  • ain'tAin't is a contraction originally for "am not", but now typically meaning "is not", "am not", or "are not". The word is a perennial problem in English usage. It is considered by prescriptivists to be a shibboleth; as with i'n'it its frequent use is said t
  • hain't (when derived from ain't rather than haven't)