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

[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.