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

[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.