Re: Trigger language question concerning the use of "to be"

Alex J. Man wrote:

> Okay, I've been developing a language that uses a trigger system and
> have decided that there will be no "to be." State verbs,
> particularly, replace its role. Eg, He is good would be translated as
> He goods.
Very minor cavil: personally, I find that un-Engl. translation ugly and
unnecessary.  Why not simply "he is.good"? or '...(is) good'. In German and
Dutch writing about Indonesian, for ex., adjectives are often glossed with
the additional "to be"-- Indo. berat (heavy) zwaar zijn, schwersein. My Kash
evidently works much like your language in treating adjs. as verbs, so
"yaleñ" /ja'leN/ is "he/she/it is good", segmented ya- 3d.sing.(subj.) + leñ
'good'; it isn't conjugated when used attributively: etengi leñ 'a good
book'.  If pressed to explain or paraphrase "yaleñ", a Kash speaker would
probably come up with something like "To-him (is) goodness"

However, I have come across the problem when addressing
> infinitives. How, exactly, would a sentence such as "To defend is to
> attack" for example be handled in this case? Both words are
> infinitives, leaving no place for a verb to exist. Is there a
> grammatical way around this problem?
I think you answer your own question later on: "Gerunds and
> participles are also utilized extensively." So use the gerund form, or
> some other nominal derivative, like "defense".  But here, as Chris Bates
> points out, the "is" functions here a little differently than in "he is
> good"-- perhaps you need a verb meaning "is-same-as", "equal-to".
Kash also has a gerund/infinitive form that could be used in just this case,
and also has a copula "to be" that is used in such statements of identity.
So we could have: tikasale yale vacanale 'seeing is believing' (tikas 'see',
vacan 'believe', -ale 'gerund.ending'. The only problem is that the gerund
form has been consigned to the dust-heap of formal and rather archaic
speech, so there are many ways of paraphrasing such expressions.

The language also has eliminated to
> verb, "to have" in a sense - translating sentences such as "I have a
> car" as "My cars exists" (dubbed existence sentences).
Likewise Kash, likewise Indonesian, though both also have verbs meaning
"have=own, possess".

> This is my first true conlang
> and this seems to be a big problem.....
> whew, sorry if that's a
> bit lengthy, but this is my first post and I decided to play it safe
> and give some background info on the subject.
>
Sounds interesting, I hope we'll see more of it.