On Jan 29, 2009, at 9:37 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Since I hope to be back soon, I should give early warning by
remarking that a
(to me) more interesting question is whether any languages have
gotten by
without 'is' (or 'am' or 'are') Answer: yes. (A few of these 'zero
copula'
langauges are Chinese, Indonesian, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Irish,
Amerindian,
Turkic, Hungarian, 'Ebonic', American Sign Language, and quite on
and on. Thus
they would never say the likes of, "Sentimentalism is...", "Taste
is..." You'll
know I'm approaching by the sound of a thundering herd of dead
horses. Man, I
love 'em. You just can't beat a good dead horse.
Are you implying that in a zero-copula, one cannot make the error that
one makes in a copulating language when one says "Sentimentalism is X"?
If so (i.e., zero-copula is not susceptible of this error), how does
the use of "to be" produce the error? Or to put it conversely, if the
two languages produce essentially equivalent statements, why does the
zero-copula syntax not produce the error?
Come to think of it, are you asserting the primacy of celibate syntax?
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
