A linguistic question (looking mainly at you thnidu, but there are other folks who might know, too)

[xiphias]

Elsejournal, a couple days ago, someone wrote a post which quoted Bishop John Shelby Spong: "The verb 'to be' is the key verb in every human language. We use it to describe that which is of our very essence."

The post was, and is, a lovely meditation on the nature of coming out, and the reactions to National Coming Out Day, but I objected to that quote, saying that plenty of languages lack a verb "to be".

So it started me wondering: do languages with an explicit verb "to be" fall into any specific clusters? Do some language families have them, and others lack them, or is it more scattershot?

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

Tell me a language that lacks it.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

ASL doesn't have a copula, all other languages that I can find a reference to while quickly googling and in four years of studying linguistics do. Check out "copula" and "zero copula" on Wikipedia.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

That "zero copula" article says that some South American indigenous languages have no copula at all and that in several others, the copula is an auxiliary verb or an affix, both of which seem to militate against the idea that it is "key in every language".

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Biblical Hebrew is the one I most know. I can also point to constructed languages, such as Klingon.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

Modern Hebrew has one, which leads me to believe that in Biblical Hebrew it's omitted, not nonexistent. And if you're bringing up conlangs, it leads me to believe that you're just fucking around rather than trying to have a serious conversation about linguistics.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

No; it was added in in modern Hebrew. I don't remember about Medieval Hebrew -- it may have gone in later. I feel that conlangs are part of reasonable linguistic discourse, since they DO experiment with what language is, but perhaps they're not part of THIS discussion, since I'm wondering about whether there are relationships among languages without copulas.

In any case, I consider modern Hebrew to be a conlang based on a natural language. As such, it has linguistic features from Germanic languages, since the primary language of the first speakers was largely Yiddish.

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

In any case, I consider modern Hebrew to be a conlang based on a natural language.

I see where you're coming from, with that, but I think it's actually even more interesting than that. Prior to Hebrew being spoken as a native language again, you had different groups of Jews in Palestine, coming from different linguistic backgrounds (the main divisions, obviously, being Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim, Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardim, and Judeo-Arabic-speaking Mizrahim, though there were plenty of other folks, including Ashkenazim who spoke German rather than Yiddish, Persian-speaking Jews, etc) who needed a language to use in common, and Hebrew, a sort of pidginised, lingua franca form of Hebrew, was that. And everyone brought to the table what they had gotten from their particular native languages. So when people started raising their kids speaking Hebrew, they already sort of had a community of adult speakers to influence them. The difference was, relative to other situations like this (out of which creole languages are formed), there was a good deal more literacy, and more awareness of the history of Hebrew, and what 'good' (literary, Bibical) Hebrew looks like. So you started out with a sort of a pidgin situation, followed by the insertion of native speakers, raised by non-native speakers of a variety of Hebrew that wasn't really pidginised at all. Initially, I'm sure utterances were somewhere in between the two, a kind of creole, but the situation was such that it was bound to be mostly decreolised. So really... it's probably most like Afrikaans.

It does sometimes remind me of Esperanto, though. I'd be curious to see what would happen if a small state were formed, with Esperanto as an official language. You'd get a similar mix of levels, and people bringing different things to the table, linguistically speaking, along with a very vague consensus on what the language should and shouldn't look/sound like.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Well . . . I'm not sure I completely agree with your analysis. I really see the story of Modern Hebrew as starting with "being made up by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, based on Hebrew vocabulary, including affixes, and inspired by Hebrew grammar." After that point, of course, once it escaped his clutches, it started doing all the "language on the loose" things that languages do, which is where you get all those other things.

But I don't think Modern Hebrew ever went through a creole phase, which is why I consider it a conlang. It was created, then taught academically, and only then, after an actual "Official Correct Hebrew" already existed, was it let loose into the world in order to run and skip and play freely the way languages actually do.

Modern Hebrew is the only language I know of which has an actual Academy that has existed as long as the language itself has existed. Of course, those few modern Israelis who are aware that the Academy exists completely ignore it.

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

Well, not to diminish Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's efforts to make it a native language again, but the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language predates him, and the resultant movement, while it acknowledges him as founder, owes a great deal to earlier revivalists.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Modern Hebrew went through a creole phase, just that it was influenced by the 'business Hebrew' being spoken when its first native speakers were growing up. I'm happy to agree to disagree, though, if our perspectives cannot be reconciled.

[shmuelisms.livejournal.com]

I'm going to strongly agree with embryomystic. While he WAS a great man AND did a lot to help "revive" Hebrew, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda was given a LOT more credit and glorification that warranted by history. Even in Europe, Hebrew was a SPOKEN language. It was just a HIGHLY "specialized" one, used primarily and dealing with the Torah world. People like to claim that it was mostly "written only", but how could this be the case, when we have so many collections of actual speeches given over the centuries. Another claim is that this was merely rehashed "Ancient" [Talmudic era] Hebrew, but this too is clearly not the case. Throughout Jewish history not only do we have [secular] Jewish poetry, but only plays written for the less educated audiences. So so-called "Modern" Hebrew is merely the end product of a slow almost continuous progression of the language over time.

Idolizing Ben-Yehuda is largely due to the "revisionist" history of the secular Zionist movement, who wanted to create the impression of a clear-cut Something New [Tm] from the older Jewish tradition. It could rightfully be argued that to these secular largely assimilated Jews, Hebrew WAS something new. But that was hardly the whole picture.

Are you really certain Biblical Hebrew doesn't have ANY copula usage. I'd be surprised if none of the formulations of the root Hayah (Heh, yud, Heh) or the related Hoveh (Heh, vav, Heh), qualified.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Oh -- and as far as Esperanto goes: Esperanto started changing organically the minute it started being spoken, and Zamenhof wisely made absolutely no attempt to crack down on that and enforce a "Correct Esperanto." Other people did, of course, but they were ignored, and Esperanto has gone through a natural language evolution process, just like any other language.

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

You're not wrong, but at the same time, a language being used by a bunch of self-conscious, literate adults, with minimal numbers of native speakers, is rather different from almost every language on the planet.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

I don't know Biblical Hebrew, but I have studied it some and know somewhat about it, and I believe that it has no copula in the present tense. I know that to be true of Russian; e.g.,

I am in America.	Я __ в Америке.
I was in America.	Я был в Америке.
I will be in America.	Я буду в Америке.

Чёрт возьми! I go to the work of inputting the raw HTML for a nicely spaced, readable table, and LJ shows it fine in the preview, but ignores it almost entirely when I post the comment!

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

I've always rather liked the idea of E-Prime.

[dancing-crow.livejournal.com]

yes. I worked hard to speak E-Prime for a long time. E-Prime makes much of parenting easier, and a lot of my writing clearer.

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Is "lihiyot" not used anywhere in the Torah? Even if it's not, how or why do you exclude "(v')hayah" and "(va-)yehi" as instances of "to be"?

[richardf8]

Um, the 9th word of The torah is היתה, from the root היה. It is not often used in copula in the present tense, either in biblical or modern Hebrew, where the "verbless sentence" is preferred. There are those that even argue that the tetragrammaton itself is derived from this root. See also the response God gives Moshe when asked for a name: "אהיה אשר אהיה."

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

Irish, like Spanish and premodern French, has two verbs that correspond to English 'to be'. One is the copula, the verb that equates one thing and another (this one is often omitted, particularly when emphasising the subject), and the other is a verb that is cognate to English 'to stand', and talks about being in a state, or in a place, or in the process of doing something.

I have some vague sense that creole languages tend to omit or lack a copula, but I am not fluent in any creoles myself.

[linenoise.livejournal.com]

IANA Linguistics major, but I wrote my term thesis for Buddhist Philosophy on basically this question. The gist of which was that the linguistic differences between Classical Chinese and Latin had a lot to do with some of the major religious difference between Buddhism and Christianity. (It was a Bachelor's level elective, I never studied Classical Chinese as a language, etc. Although I think if I had actually pursued Philosophy, I probably *would* have eventually learned Chinese, because the question fascinated me far beyond the scope of a 20-page term paper.)

Being able to say "I am" and have it be understood as a complete sentence expressing a complete thought would tend to lead a speaker towards an essentialist sort of perspective. The concept of the "soul", the eternal self, is easier to believe because it's easier to speak. The way it was presented to me at the time (aged by about ten years of not reading philosophy) is that there's no way to translate the same thought into Classical Chinese. There aren't words for the concept of pure existence in the same way.

Some reading on the Wikipedia page for "copula" seems to suggest this is kind of an active debate. Modern Chinese *does* have a word for "to be", but there's debate about the evolution of that word.

To be is to do. —Socrates
To do is to be. —Plato
Do-be-do-be-do. —Sinatra

[navrins]

I am not even a little bit of a linguist, and am furthermore functionaly monolingual though I know a little bit of a lot of languages. So maybe this is my fundamental Anglo/Latin-centrism speaking here. But it seems to me that one possible way of understanding the absence of an explicit verb "to be" in a language is that in those languages it is considered *so* key, *so* essential, that it doesn't even need to be spoken. The verb equivalent of breathing *air*, of being married *to one's spouse*, of "you" being the person I'm talking to, of putting "until it's safe, and then go" on a STOP sign - all things that could be expressed in words in English but that we very rarely bother to do because they would seem redundant to us. Maybe?

An answer

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Got a kind of an answer here, and it may surprise a lot of folks: Of 386 languages surveyed, close to half -- 45% -- allow a zero copula in sentences like "John is a sailor".

This is from the World Atlas of Language Structures Online (WALS); click on the chapter title just below for more detail.

Chapter 120: Zero Copula for Predicate Nominals
by Leon Stassen

1. Defining the values

This map shows the areal distribution of zero copula encoding for predicate nominals. That is, the map indicates whether a given language is like English, in which predicate nominals always require an overt copula (see 1), or rather like Russian, in which omission of the copula is allowed for at least some constructions (see 2).

(1)
a. John is a sailor.
b. *John a sailor.
[The asterisk means "This is ungrammatical: no native speaker would say it or accept it, unless by mistake."]

(2) Russian (Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm p.c.)
Moskva gorod
Moscow city
‘Moscow is a city.’

Thus, the following values will be shown on the map:

Values of Map 120A. Zero Copula for Predicate Nominals

⬤	Zero copula is impossible	211
⃝	Zero copula is possible	175
	total:	386

Respectfully submitted,
Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoëpist, and Philological Busybody

 

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Languages which are closely related areally or genetically may differ considerably in the extent to which they allow zero encoding. For instance, while Austronesian languages typically opt for zero encoding, a full copula is mandatory in a closely related group of three Austronesian languages from northern and central Vanuatu (Ambrym, Big Nambas, and Paamese).

That pretty much answers my original question, yeah. While there are some areas of the Earth where zero-copula languages are more common than others, there isn't a real strong "this language family does/that language family doesn't" thing going on.