Re: do be do be do

At 5:14 pm -0500 24/5/99, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Fabian wrote:
>>
>> My French lecturer recently said that every language needs teh verbs be and
>> have.
>
>Hmmm, that's odd.  Why would he say that?  I can think of languages
>without a verb for "to be" (such as Russian in the present) and those
>without "to have" (Irish [Celtic in general?],
Yep - Celtic in general.

Cornish & Breton grammars will give a verb "to have" - but it's very
anomalous & quite like anything else.  A closer look with show that it's a
contraction of possessive adjective + "to be", so "I have" is, so to speak,
"mine is".

Welsh has a construction on similar lines to Russian & the Gaelic languages.
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And at 8:02 pm -0500 24/5/99, Carlos Thompson wrote:
.......
>
>"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).
Not sure about the Gaelic languages off hand, but Welsh, Cornish & Breton
certainly use "to do" as an auxiliary (and not in the way English does,
either).

I'm fairly certain I've have come across its use as an auxiliary elsewhere,
but I can't call them to mind at the moment.
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