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.

[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