I´d say this is not needed, when people say “Snow is white” we know that it really means “Snow seems white to me”, so saying it as “Snow seems white to me” adds length without adding information.
Ah, but imagine we’re all-powerful reformists that can change absolutely anything! In that case, we can add a really simple verb that means “seems-to-me” (let’s say “smee” for short) and then ask people to say “Snow smee white”.
Of course, this doesn’t make sense unless we provide alternatives. For instance, “er” for “I have heard that”, as in “Snow er white, though I haven’t seen it myself” or “The dress er gold, but smee blue.”
It isn’t possible for someone to consistently assert “X is true, but X doesn’t seem true to me”. And it isn’t possible for someone to consistently assert “X seems true to me, but X is false”. [1] So even though “seems to me” and “is” are not logically the same thing, no human being can separate them and we have no need for a special word to make it convenient to separate them.
[1] Of course they can assert that if we use a secondary meaning for ‘seems’ such as “superficially appears to be”, but that’s not the meaning of ‘seems’ in question here.
Ah, but imagine we’re all-powerful reformists that can change absolutely anything! In that case, we can add a really simple verb that means “seems-to-me” (let’s say “smee” for short) and then ask people to say “Snow smee white”.
Of course, this doesn’t make sense unless we provide alternatives. For instance, “er” for “I have heard that”, as in “Snow er white, though I haven’t seen it myself” or “The dress er gold, but smee blue.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality
It isn’t possible for someone to consistently assert “X is true, but X doesn’t seem true to me”. And it isn’t possible for someone to consistently assert “X seems true to me, but X is false”. [1] So even though “seems to me” and “is” are not logically the same thing, no human being can separate them and we have no need for a special word to make it convenient to separate them.
[1] Of course they can assert that if we use a secondary meaning for ‘seems’ such as “superficially appears to be”, but that’s not the meaning of ‘seems’ in question here.
A quarter of the worlds languages mark evidentiality at a grammer level. Indo-European languages like English don’t do this but other languages do.