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

Taliesin wrote:
<<
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".
 >>

And John:
<<
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.
 >>

Here's some Uralic.  This is Western Mari:

Present Desiderative Tense:
(a) kol@nem "I want to die"
(b) @nem kol@ "I don't want to die"

First Past Tense:
(a) kol@S@m "I died"
(b) S@m kola "I didn't die"

Second Past Tense:
(a) kolen&m "I died"
(b) kol@Delam "I didn't die"

These paradigms are interesting for a bunch of reasons, but what's
relevant is that there's also a negative auxiliary:

Present Negative Auxiliary:
(a) Onem "I'm not"

First Past Negative Auxiliary:
(a) SOm "I wasn't"

As well as a copula which has both positive and negative versions
(I only have the variants for Eastern Mari; not sure how similar
they are).

Oh, but, of course, the ultimate counterexample is Moro: the Niger-
Kordofanian language from Sudan we've been studying here at
UCSD for the past two years.  Here's the info:

Damala Deb@tSo = "The camel is white."
kuku udZi = "Kuku's a man."
Damala Dasa = "The camel eats."
Damala Daso = "The camel ate."

And I'm 100% certain the guy who wrote that dissertation didn't
have these examples.   Moro also has a negative verb used for
negation.  I forget what it looks like...  Has a [k] in it somewhere...
Anyway, you'd put it in between each of the pairs of words from
above, and that'd give you "The camel isn't white", "Kuku's not a
man", "The camel doesn't eat", and "The camel didn't eat".  I think
noun class agreement would go on the negative verb, and you
get some sort of a non-finite form of the verb (not so with the
adjective and the noun).

Anyway, I can see why it would be useful to have a verb "to be"
if you mark tense.  After all, how else could you say "He was a
teacher" (in Moro, you use a different verb, or say "He's not a
teacher anymore")?  I don't see why a dissertation is necessary
to try to prove that it must be so--especially since it doesn't seem
to be.  But, then again, typological dissertations give us lots of
nice new data.

-David
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"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

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