Indo-European In
Indo-European languages, the words meaning
to be are sometimes similar to each other. Due to the high frequency of their use, their inflection retains a considerable degree of similarity in some cases. Thus, for example, the English form
is is a
cognate of German , Latin , Persian and Russian , even though the Germanic, Italic, Iranian and Slavic language groups split at least 3000 years ago. The origins of the copulas of most Indo-European languages can be traced back to four
Proto-Indo-European stems: (), (), and ().
English The English copular verb
be has eight basic forms (
be,
am,
is,
are,
being,
was,
were,
been) and five negative forms (''ain't
in some dialects, isn't
, aren't
, wasn't
, weren't
). No other English verb has more than five forms. Additional archaic forms include art
, wast
, wert
, and occasionally beest'' (as a
subjunctive). The possibility of copula omission is mentioned under . A particular construction found in English (particularly in speech) is the use of
two successive copulas when only one appears necessary, as in
My point is, is that.... The acceptability of this construction is a
disputed matter in English prescriptive grammar. The simple English copula
be may on occasion be substituted by other verbs with near identical meanings.
Pashto In Pashto, the verb ول (wal) functions as the copula like the verb " To Be " in English, linking the subject of a sentence to a predicate, such as a noun or adjective. The copula is inflected for person and number, and in the third person also for gender; in the first and second person, it does not change for gender. In the past tense, the copula systematically changes the consonant "Y" to "W", e.g., present yam → past wam. The future tense is formed by placing the particle "Ba" after the subject and before the present form of the copula. In the third person, "Ba" precedes "Yi" rather than the usual present forms de/da/di. The past habitual tense in Pashto also uses the particle "Ba" with the copula. Unlike the future tense, in which "Ba" follows the present form of the copula, in the past habitual tense "Ba" is followed by the past form of the copula corresponding to the subject e.g., Za Ba Wam ( I used to be), indicating repeated or customary actions in the past.
Persian In Persian, the verb
to be can take the form of either (cognate to English
is) or (cognate to
be). :
Hindustani In
Hindustani (
Hindi and
Urdu), the copula can be put into four grammatical aspects (simple, habitual, perfective, and progressive) and each of those four aspects can be put into five grammatical moods (indicative, presumptive, subjunctive, contrafactual, and imperative). Some example sentences using the simple aspect are shown below: Besides the verb , there are three other verbs which can also be used as the copula: , , and . The following table shows the conjugations of the copula in the five grammatical moods in the simple aspect. The transliteration scheme used is
ISO 15919.
Romance Copulas in the
Romance languages usually consist of two different verbs that can be translated as "to be", the main one from the Latin (via
Vulgar Latin ; deriving from
*es-), often referenced as (another of the Latin verb's
principal parts) and a secondary one from (from
*sta-), often referenced as . The resulting distinction in the modern forms is found in all the
Iberian Romance languages, and to a lesser extent Italian but only with adverbs like "bene" and "male", but not in French or Romanian. The difference is that the first usually refers to essential characteristics, while the second refers to states and situations, e.g., "Bob is old" versus "Bob is well." A similar division is found in the non-Romance
Basque language (viz. and ). (The English words just used, "essential" and "state", are also cognate with the Latin infinitives and . The word "stay" also comes from Latin , through Middle French , stem of Old French .) In Spanish and Portuguese, the high degree of verbal
inflection, plus the existence of two copulas ( and ), means that there are 105 (Spanish) and 110 (Portuguese) separate forms to express the copula, compared to eight in English and one in Chinese. In some cases, the verb itself changes the meaning of the adjective/sentence. The following examples are from Portuguese:
Slavic Some
Slavic languages make a distinction between essence and state (similar to that discussed in the above section on the
Romance languages), by putting a predicative expression denoting a state into the
instrumental case, and essential characteristics are in the
nominative. This can apply with other copula verbs as well: the verbs for "become" are normally used with the instrumental case. As noted above under , Russian and other
North Slavic languages generally or often omit the copula in the present tense.
Irish In
Irish and
Scottish Gaelic, there are two copulas, and the
syntax is also changed when one is distinguishing between states or situations and essential characteristics. Describing the subject's state or situation typically uses the normal
VSO ordering with the verb . The copula is used to state essential characteristics or equivalences. : The word is the copula (rhymes with the English word "miss"). The pronoun used with the copula is different from the normal pronoun. For a masculine singular noun, is used (for "he" or "it"), as opposed to the normal pronoun ; for a feminine singular noun, is used (for "she" or "it"), as opposed to normal pronoun ; for plural nouns, is used (for "they" or "those"), as opposed to the normal pronoun . To describe being in a state, condition, place, or act, the verb "to be" is used:
Arabic dialects North Levantine Arabic The
North Levantine Arabic dialect, spoken in Syria and Lebanon, has a negative copula formed by and a suffixed pronoun.
Bantu languages Chichewa In
Chichewa, a
Bantu language spoken mainly in
Malawi, a very similar distinction exists between permanent and temporary states as in Spanish and Portuguese, but only in the present tense. For a permanent state, in the 3rd person, the copula used in the present tense is (negative ): : : For the 1st and 2nd persons the particle is combined with pronouns, e.g., : : : : For temporary states and location, the copula is the appropriate form of the defective verb : : : : For the 1st and 2nd persons the person is shown, as normally with Chichewa verbs, by the appropriate pronominal prefix: : : : In the past tenses, is used for both types of copula: : : In the future, subjunctive, or conditional tenses, a form of the verb is used as a copula: :
Muylaq' Aymaran Uniquely, the existence of the copulative verbalizer suffix in the Southern Peruvian
Aymaran language variety, Muylaq' Aymara, is evident only in the surfacing of a vowel that would otherwise have been deleted because of the presence of a following suffix, lexically prespecified to suppress it. As the copulative verbalizer has no independent phonetic structure, it is represented by the Greek letter ʋ in the examples used in this entry. Accordingly, unlike in most other Aymaran variants, whose copulative verbalizer is expressed with a vowel-lengthening component, -
:, the presence of the copulative verbalizer in Muylaq' Aymara is often not apparent on the surface at all and is analyzed as existing only meta-linguistically. However, in a verb phrase such as "It is old", the noun does not require the copulative verbalizer: . It is now pertinent to make some observations about the distribution of the copulative verbalizer. The best place to start is with words in which its presence or absence is obvious. When the vowel-suppressing first person simple tense suffix attaches to a verb, the vowel of the immediately preceding suffix is suppressed (in the examples in this subsection, the subscript "c" appears prior to vowel-suppressing suffixes in the interlinear gloss to better distinguish instances of
deletion that arise from the presence of a lexically pre-specified suffix from those that arise from other (e.g. phonotactic) motivations). Consider the verb , which is inflected for the first person simple tense and so, predictably, loses its final root vowel: . However, prior to the suffixation of the first person simple suffix to the same root nominalized with the agentive nominalizer , the word must be verbalized. The fact that the final vowel of below is not suppressed indicates the presence of an intervening segment, the copulative verbalizer: . It is worthwhile to compare of the copulative verbalizer in Muylaq' Aymara as compared to La Paz Aymara, a variant which represents this suffix with vowel lengthening. Consider the near-identical sentences below, both translations of "I have a small house" in which the nominal root is verbalized with the copulative verbalizer, but the correspondence between the copulative verbalizer in these two variants is not always a strict one-to-one relation. :
Georgian As in English, the verb "to be" () is irregular in
Georgian (a
Kartvelian language); different verb roots are employed in different tenses. The roots , , , and (past participle) are used in the present tense, future tense, past tense and the perfective tenses respectively. Examples: : In the last two examples (perfective and pluperfect), two roots are used in one verb compound. In the perfective tense, the root (which is the expected root for the perfective tense) is followed by the root , which is the root for the present tense. In the pluperfective tense, again, the root is followed by the past tense root . This formation is very similar to
German (an
Indo-European language), where the perfect and the pluperfect are expressed in the following way: : Here, is the past participle of in German. In both examples, as in Georgian, this participle is used together with the present and the past forms of the verb in order to conjugate for the perfect and the pluperfect aspects.
Haitian Creole Haitian Creole, a
French-based creole language, has three forms of the copula: , , and the
zero copula, no word at all (the position of which will be indicated with
Ø, just for purposes of illustration). Although no textual record exists of Haitian-Creole at its earliest stages of development from French, is derived from French (written ), which is the normal French contraction of (that, written ) and the copula (is, written ) (a form of the verb ). The derivation of is less obvious; but we can assume that the French source was ("he/it is", written ), which, in rapidly spoken French, is very commonly pronounced as (typically written ). The use of a zero copula is unknown in French, and it is thought to be an innovation from the early days when Haitian-Creole was first developing as a Romance-based
pidgin. Latin also sometimes used a zero copula. Which of //Ø is used in any given copula clause depends on complex syntactic factors that we can superficially summarize in the following four rules: 1. Use
Ø (i.e., no word at all) in declarative sentences where the complement is an adjective phrase, prepositional phrase, or adverb phrase: {{interlinear|lang=ht|number=1a) {{interlinear|lang=ht|number=1b) {{interlinear|lang=ht|number=1c) 2. Use when the complement is a noun phrase. But, whereas other verbs come after any tense/mood/aspect particles (such as to mark negation, or to explicitly mark past tense, or to mark progressive aspect), comes before any such particles: {{interlinear|lang=ht|number=2a) {{interlinear|lang=ht|number=2b) 3. Use where French and English have a
dummy "it" subject: {{interlinear|lang=ht|number=3a)|glossing2=no|lang2=fr {{interlinear|lang=ht|number=3b)|glossing2=no|lang2=fr 4. Finally, use the other copula form in situations where the sentence's syntax leaves the copula at the end of a phrase: {{interlinear|lang=ht|number=4a) {{interlinear|lang=ht|number=4b) {{interlinear|lang=ht|number=4c) {{interlinear|lang=ht|number=4d)|lang2=fr|glossing2=no The above is, however, only a simplified analysis.
Japanese The
Japanese copula (most often translated into English as an inflected form of "to be") is unique among verbs in Japanese. It is highly irregular, and in several ways behaves in ways other verbs do not; such as requiring a separate
relativised form in some circumstances, and acting simply as a marker of
formality/politeness with no predication force in some circumstances. In the most basic case, it behaves like a normal verb with irregular forms, which (like most copulas crosslinguistically) takes a non-case-marked complement instead of an object. As with all verbs in Japanese, it is necessary to mark the speaker's implied social relationship to the
addressee by the choice of verb form. The following two sentences differ only in the fact that the first is appropriate only between decently close friends or family, or said by someone of significantly higher social status than the listener, and the second is only appropriate outside of such circumstances. : Japanese has two classes of words which correspond to adjectives in English, one of which requires a copula to become a predicate and one of which does not. : However, the polite copula is used as a means to mark the self-predicating class of adjectives as grammatically formal, and thus the formal equivalent of is . In these situations, the copula is not serving as an actual predication device; it is only a means to supply formality marking. The non-self-predicating class of adjectives is the one place in modern Japanese where a separate
relativiser form appears; these require the form in order to modify nouns. : Etymologically the copula is a reduced form of , which effectively means 'exists as'; in formal situations or its formal form can appear in place of or , and in certain situations other forms of may be appropriate (such as /). Nonstandard forms such as in
Kansai and in much of the rest of western Japan (see map above) are due to various dialects reducing differently than the
Kantō-based standard form did. The negative form of the copula is generally or its reduced form (or in formal situations, substitute for ). This includes the
topic marker , due to negative copula sentences typically implying some kind of contrastive topic-like force on the complement. can occur in relative clauses, where information structure marking might be odd, but is also a general negative copula and would be sensible still in any situation might be used. Many sentences in Japanese are structurally a headless relative clause nominalised by (or its reduced form ) and then predicated with a copula; the structure is analogous to something like English ''it's that...''. This structure is used to indicate that the statement is intended to answer a question or explain confusion a listener may have had (though the question it answers may not have ever been overtly spoken). This has largely been incorporated into Japanese's
sentence-final particle system, and is far more common than the equivalent English structure. : Similarly, has also been recruited into the sentence-final particle system, and is used to mark a sentence that the speaker should have been decently obvious to the listener, or to indicate that the speaker is surprised to find that the sentence is true. In this role it can cooccur with an actual predicative , but not with the positive ; is omitted in such sentences. :
Korean For sentences with
predicate nominatives, the copula () is added to the predicate nominative (with no space in between). : Some adjectives (usually colour adjectives) are nominalized and used with the copula (). 1. Without the copula (): : 2. With the copula (): : Some Korean adjectives are derived using the copula. Separating these articles and nominalizing the former part will often result in a sentence with a related, but different meaning. Using the separated sentence in a situation where the un-separated sentence is appropriate is usually acceptable as the listener can decide what the speaker is trying to say using the context.
Chinese In
Chinese, both states and qualities are, in general, expressed with
stative verbs (SV) with no need for a copula, e.g., in
Chinese, "to be tired" ( ), "to be hungry" ( ), "to be located at" ( ), "to be stupid" ( ) and so forth. A sentence can consist simply of a pronoun and such a verb: for example, (). Usually, however, verbs expressing qualities are qualified by an adverb (meaning "very", "not", "quite", etc.); when not otherwise qualified, they are often preceded by , which in other contexts means "very", but in this use often has no particular meaning. Only sentences with a noun as the complement (e.g., "This is my sister") use the copular verb "to be": . This is used frequently; for example, instead of having a verb meaning "to be Chinese", the usual expression is "to be a Chinese person" (; ; ). This is sometimes called an
equative verb. Another possibility is for the complement to be just a noun modifier (ending in ), the noun being omitted: Before the
Han dynasty, the character served as a
demonstrative pronoun meaning "this" (this usage survives in some idioms and
proverbs.) Some linguists believe that developed into a copula because it often appeared, as a repetitive subject, after the subject of a sentence (in
classical Chinese we can say, for example: "George W. Bush,
this president of the United States" meaning "George W. Bush
is the president of the United States). The character appears to be formed as a
compound of characters with the meanings of "early" and "straight." Another use of in modern Chinese is in combination with the modifier to mean "yes" or to show agreement. For example: Question: Response: , meaning "Yes", or , meaning "No." (A more common way of showing that the person asking the question is correct is by simply saying "right" or "correct", ; the corresponding negative answer is .) Yet another use of is in the construction, which is used to emphasize a particular element of the sentence; see . In
Hokkien acts as the copula, and is the equivalent in
Wu Chinese.
Cantonese uses () instead of ; similarly,
Hakka uses .
Siouan languages In Siouan languages such as
Lakota, in principle almost all words—according to their structure—are verbs. So not only (transitive, intransitive and so-called "stative") verbs but even nouns often behave like verbs and do not need to have copulas. For example, the word refers to a man, and the verb is expressed as . Yet there also is a copula that in most cases is used: . In order to express the statement , one has to say . But, in order to express that that person is THE doctor (say, that had been phoned to help), one must use another copula : In order to refer to space (e.g., Robert is in the house), various verbs are used, e.g., (lit., ) for humans, or for inanimate objects of a certain shape. "Robert is in the house" could be translated as , whereas "There's one restaurant next to the gas station" translates as
Constructed languages The
constructed language Lojban has two words that act similar to a copula in natural languages. The clause turns whatever follows it into a predicate that means to be (among) what it follows. For example, means "to be Bob", and means "to be one of the three sisters". Another one is , which is itself a predicate that means all its arguments are the same thing (equal). One word which is often confused for a copula in Lojban, but is not one, is . It merely indicates that the word which follows is the main predicate of the sentence. For example, means "my friend is a musician", but the word does not correspond to English
is; instead, the word , which is a predicate, corresponds to the entire phrase "is a musician". The word is used to prevent , which would mean "the friend-of-me type of musician". == See also ==