Indo-European copula

A feature common to all Indo-European languages is the presence of a verb corresponding to the English verb "to be".

General features

This verb has two basic meanings. In a less marked context it is a simple copula ("I'm tired"; "That's a shame!"), a function which in non-Indo-European languages can be expressed quite differently. In a more heavily marked context it expresses existence ("I think therefore I am"); the dividing line between these is not always easy to draw. In addition, many Indo-European languages use this verb as an auxiliary for the formation of compound (periphrastic) tenses ("I'm working"; "I was bitten"). Other functions vary from language to language. For example, although in its basic meanings, "to be" is a stative verb, English puts it to work as a dynamic verb in fixed collocations ("You are being very annoying").

The copula is the most irregular verb in many Indo-European languages. This is partly because it is more frequently used than any other, and partly because Proto-Indo-European offered more than one verb suitable for use in these functions, with the result that the daughter languages, in different ways, have tended to form suppletive verb paradigms. This article describes the way in which the irregular forms have developed from a series of roots.

The Proto-Indo-European roots

"*h₁es-"

The root "*h₁es-" was certainly already a copula in Proto-Indo-European. The e-grade (see Indo-European ablaut) is found in such forms as English "is", German "ist", Latin "est", while the zero grade produces forms beginning with /s/, like German "sind", Latin "sumus", Vedic Sanskrit "smas", etc. In PIE, "*h₁es-" was an athematic verb in "-mi", that is, the first person singular was "*h₁esmi"; this inflection survives in English "am", Sanskrit "asmi", Old Church Slavonic Unicode|"есмь" (jesm'), etc.

The present indicative of this verb is generally reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European thus:

Vedic Sanskrit

The Vedic Sanskrit verb "as" (to be) is derived from the Indo-European root *"PIE|h₁es-".

Baltic languages

In several modern Romance languages, the perfect is a compound tense formed with the participle as in English, but the old Latin perfect survives as a commonly-used preterite in Spanish and Portuguese, and as a literary "past historical" in French, Italian and Catalan.

There is a tendency for a past participle derived from "stare" (or more specifically its supine, "statum") to replace that of the main copula derived from "esse". For example, the French participle "été" comes from "statum".

For further information, see the main article.

Germanic languages

Gaelic "(bh)eil" and Irish "(bh)fuil" are from Old Irish "fil", originally an imperative meaning "see!" (PIE root "*wel-", also in Welsh "gweled", Germanic "wlitu-" "appearance", and Latin voltus "face"), then coming to mean "here is" (cf. French "voici < vois ci" and "voilà < vois là"), later becoming a suppletive dependent form of "at-tá". Gaelic "robh" and Modern Irish "raibh" are from the perfective particle "ro" ("ry" in Welsh) plus "ba" (lenited after "ro").

References

*cite book | author=Jasanoff, Jay H. | title=Hittite and the Indo-European Verb | location=Oxford | publisher=Oxford University Press | year=2003 | id=ISBN 0-19-924905-9
*http://www.gaeliccollege.edu/lessons/verbs/tha.html

ee also

*List of common Indo-European roots
*Grammatical conjugation
*Proto-Indo-European verb