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

[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."