Re: Copula

On Sun, Mar 18, 2007 at 10:29:19PM -0400, Jason Monti wrote:
> Hi everyone!
>
> I have another question that will probably leave the experts rolling
> their eyes at my "n00bidity", but it's been nagging me.
>
> Why is it that the copula takes two nominatives, rather than a
> nominative and an accusative, even though it seems to me at least to
> be a bivalent verb?
[...]

Not all languages do this (and English itself is diverging from this:
e.g., it's much more common to hear "It's him!" rather than "It's he!").
FWIW, in Russian, the verb to-be (быть) in some cases require the
instrumental case rather than the nominative.

ObConlang: Tatari Faran has no copula, period. It gets by with simple
juxtaposition. In a simple statement of equivalence, e.g., "That is a
rabbit", the equivalent of the English subject is in the conveyant case,
and the predicate is in the absolutive case:

	mei   sei      tiki.
	(this CVY.FEM) rabbit
	This is a rabbit.

	tara' sa        bata'.
	(3sp  CVY.MASC) chief
	He is the chief (or, a chief).

(The subject NP has been parenthesized in the interlinear to make the
syntactic structure clearer.)

Note, though, that TF's case system is very, very different from IE-like
case systems, so this may not be a fair comparison.


T

--
There is no gravity. The earth sucks.

Reply