Re: "to be" and not to be in the world's languages

From: "Arthaey Angosii" <arthaey@...>
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2006 11:40 PM

> Emaelivpeith taliesin the storyteller:
>> Basically: languages which inflect the verb itself for
>> present and
>> preterite/past, will also have a verb for "to be".
>> Examples include most
>> IE-languages. Languages which use some other way to show
>> time, don't
>> have a verb for "to be". Examples include Chinese. The
>> reason why "to
>> be" is needed is because you can't add a particle/word
>> meaning "not"
>> directly to a noun used as a predicate, you need a
>> buffer-word of some
>> sort, hence "to be".
Ayeri is odd in this respect in that "to be" is usually
omitted when it's not marked, that is, in the present tense
indicative. Person marking doesn't count in this case. I
played with the idea that the word could be completely
omitted so that the various marker for tense and mode could
stand on their own, like Arthaey said, but I didn't like
this idea somehow. _maoiayang_ (I wasn't) looks weird
without a stem (yom(a), to be, to exist) and also could be
easily confused with a potential stem _ma_, which doesn't
exist yet.

--
"Miranayam cepauarà naranoaris."
(Calvin nay Hobbes)

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