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

[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.