tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Nov 08 09:24:29 1995
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Re: jIlIH(')egh, etc.
>Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 08:46:37 -0800
>From: "d'Armond Speers" <[email protected]>
>On Wed, 8 Nov 1995, Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>> Ah. That runs into a question in just about all languages that have
>> anything like a copula (are there any that don't?)
>Russian, Arabic (in the present tense), ASL, that I know about 1st
>hand, and probably a hundred others.
>> ~mark
>--Holtej
I knew someone would say this and that I should be more specific. I said
"anything like a copula" and I meant it. Russian doesn't have a word or
verb that is a copula, but it has a construction that functions similarly.
You might say there's a "null morph" that's represented by a dash in
writing that does the job. All those languages have constructions that do
what a copula does: they indicate that X equals Y. It's just that in many
languages, the "equals" is understood or unnecessary (or to look at it the
other way, English redundantly has something there), and you just state the
two things which are equated. I was asking if there was a language that
did not have a way to indicate X=Y (particularly a nice heavily polysemous
way like English and the languages you mentioned. I think Lojban, with its
excruciating specificity, doesn't have this problem, since it's careful to
flag when names are being used and when they are being mentioned, and tries
to have very little polysemy in its predicates).
~mark