Re: Verb-initial languages

Isaac Penzev scripsit:

> Dawid hu melekh tov.
> David he king good.
> David is a good king.
This looks rather more like topic-comment:  as for David, he [is] a good king.
The Mandarin copula "shi", which has no reflex in the other Sinitic languages,
descends from a Middle Chinese demonstrative used in just this way, but
even now it is perfectly all right to use two nouns without a copula
(though not a noun+adjective, nor is it all right to omit "shi" in the
presence of negation).

ObIrrelevant:  Emma Lazarus, the author of the Statue of Liberty poem
I quoted yesterday, wrote it to be auctioned off as part of the fund-raising
in America for the statue: in both America and France, the effort nearly
failed because of insufficient donations by the public.  It was not
inscribed on the statue until after Lazarus's death at age 38.

Lazarus was a Sephardic Jew of a family long established in the U.S.
She was a Zionist even before Herzl, but also worked on a project to help
Russian Jewish immigrants of the 1890s adjust to American life.

--
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all.  There
are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language
that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
        --_The Hobbit_