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

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 16:00:00 +0200, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
wrote:

>On 3/22/06, Rob Haden <magwich78@...> wrote:
>> Slavic languages typically don't have "to be" in the present tense.
>
>Is this really typical?
>
>I know that Russian doesn't have "to be" in the present tense, but
>Polish and Czech do. I'm fairly sure Bulgarian and Serbian do as well.
>
>Maybe Russian is the odd one out and the "typical" behaviour for
>Slavic languages *is* to have a present-tense "to be"?
Yes, you could be right.  Russian still does have a verb for "be":
infinitive _byt'_, 3sg pres. _jest'_, past _byl(a/o)_, etc.  Interestingly,
the Slavic languages have a suppletive paradigm for "to be", just as the
Germanic and Italic languages do (I'm not sure about Celtic).  There may be
a shared isogloss at work here.

- Rob