Satan

Translate this o holy men of eprime:

Exodus 3:14

And God said unto Moses, "I am THAT I am" ... I am hath sent me unto you.

Square

As some E-Prime site mentioned, "eprimification" could hardly apply to statements like this.

The Bibilical God probably meant this to sound as ambigous as possible, anyway.

ncannino

roughly something like "I exist as that of which I exist." just like translating to other languages, some meanings can never replicate with eprime.

Michael

Understanding that statement in standard English has difficulties of its own...

The closest translation possible, in my limited understanding, would run as follows: "I equivilate to existence." (I º existence).

Bromo33333

The classic "I shall be that I shall be" (Ehyeh asher ehyeh / אהיה אשר אהיה)

This verse would remain unadulterated in my version of an e-prime Bible. It feels correct, and if one breaks e prime rules over something, I feel this seems a good reason!

Plus, as one poster pointed out, this phrase causes confusion, perhaps on purpose! (As in "How dare you try to pidgeonhole the creator!")

__________________
“Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end, speech conveys not ostentation, but understanding.” - William Penn (trans to e-prime)
==
Bromo33333

jeni_fini

Everyone will probably interpret this different. I personally think he is saying, take me for who I am, as we would say... This is who I am, accept me for who I am.

KateGladstone

Re:

... which conveys *what*, exactly?

KateGladstone

Re:

Hmmm ... so how would your "E-Prime Bible" put that into a language which had *never*, *ever* had any verb equivalent to "be"?

Tim Lyons

Popeye, a kind of minor deity, seemed fond of saying, "I yam what I yam."

Someone (perhaps Hayakawa) once said something like this: If you can't reduce abstractions to operations, perhaps you should qualify the statement as nonsense. "Johnny is an idiot" may stand for "I don't like the dude," or, "Johnny scores less than 60 on IQ tests." Maybe Jawveh meant, "You learn a lot about my nature if you look at my creations." That doesn't help much, perhaps because of "nature."

I think Popeye's stands for something like this: "I don't see how to act differently from the way I have always acted; I can't seem to break myself of the habit of eating spinach and knowing the stuffing out of Bluto."

KateGladstone

Hmmmm ... so translate "I am what I am" as "I do what I do"?

;-S

Karen

Take me at face value.

Tim Lyons

To Karen: I don't know what "take me at face value" might mean for a deity, particularly one that, as I recall, didn't show his face.

To Kate: I admit: strange idea: I am = I do.

I think may Popeye's statement made more sense than the Biblical one does, considering the context (i.e. we have a more accurate record of Popeye's actions than we do of Jawveh's), but that may reveal my non-theistic bias. If we have a statement that we feel tempted to categorize as "non-sense," and if we want to make it into a sensible statement, we generall try to reduce the abstraction-level. This generally means that we take the "is" and try to find what operations lie behind it.

It seems that our sense of -- or, my sense of who I "am" arises from various physical and mental operations, not all of them deliberate. I do this and that; I think this and that; I conclude that I "am" this. One of the mental operations, I suppose, goes like this: I tell myself that "I am this person." I wonder if this idea of "being" amounts to anything other than operations mental (including emotional insofar as emotions arise as mental events) and physical (and emotional, insofar as emotions arise as physical events). Some will find this hopelessly "unspiritual" or even depressing, but some have said that all our suffering comes from our fixation on this "I am" business. I don't know if it all does, but a lot of it seems to.

Karen

lol. I did not mean literally 'face value'.

The 'am' can reflect what characterizes a part of you, but not you in your entirety.