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

On 3/28/06, Stephen Mulraney <ataltane.conlang@...> wrote:
>  Oh? Pray, elaborate!  What's the Russian present
>  tense to be? I thought there was just "jest'" (which,
>  with the soft sign looks like an infinitive rather than
>  the 3rd singular I thought it was).
No, it's 3d sg despite the ь.  The infinitive is быть.  The
third-person plural present is суть.  I don't know what the first or
second person forms are...

>  (ja) jestem    1s
>  (ty) jestes'   2s
>  (on) jest   3s
>  (my) jestes'my    1p
>  (wy) jestes'cie   2p
>  (oni) sa,       3p
>
>  (Can't type Polish letters here: s' = s-acute /s\/,
>  a, = a-hook /O~/)
Was nobody paying attention when the Unicode copy-and-paste page was
posted here? :)  On Windows you could just use Character Map to
accomplish the same thing.  I mean, it's a royal pain to use c&p, and
you wouldn't want to do it for any lengthy text, but for isolated
citations of a few words with only one or two characters to paste,
it's not that bad.  And you're using gmail, so pasting Unicode chars
into the web form should work fine.

Pasted from Character Map on my Windows box (my Mac is dead, and I
don't think I'm going to convince my boss to lay out the $1000 to fix
it... :( ):

s-acute: ś
a-hook: ả

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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