Re: do be do be do

Fabian wrote:


> My French lecturer recently said that every language needs teh verbs be
and
> have.
>
> I quickly disillusioned him, but I was wondering about the verb 'do'. How
> essential is it? AN ddoes its essentiallity change in languages which make
> do without be or have?
"to do", I don't know but surely on the auxiliary use of "to do" many
languages live without it (actually I only know English for having it but my
knoledge is quite small).  On the wildcard use (the pro-verb), I guess any
language could formulate the question "what are you doing?" but I could
imagine that a language full of preverbs or auxiliary could manage a way of
asking that without using a verb.

In Spanish "to do" is merged with "to make".  You could also thing like
"hacer" actually means "to make" and that it is used in the sense of "to do"
due to the lack of other word.  What I mean is that, if you don't have a
wildcard verb, questions like "what are you doing" will find a way...
 probably I don't even know what I mean :-( )

-- Carlos Th