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

>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".
It just occurs to me that the negative verb of Uralic languages sort of
counters this argument, but I don't know if any of them get by without a
neutral copula. Since they're fairly inflecting & I think mostly pro-drop
too, I'd however suspect not.

John Vertical

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