The Verb ‘Be’ and Its Synonyms: Philosophical and Grammatical Studies (2): Eskimo/Hindi/Zuni/Modern Greek/Malayalam/Kurukh 9789401522113, 9789401534406

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THE VERB 'BE' AND ITS SYNONYMS

(2)

FOUNDATIONS OF LANGUAGE SUPPLEMENTARY SERIES

Editors MORRIS HALLE, PETER HARTMANN,

MIT

MilnsterfW. Madras

K. KUNJUNNI RAJA, BENSON MATES,

Univ. of California

1. F. ST AAL,

Amsterdam

PIETER A. VERBURG, JOHN W. M. VERHAAR

Groningen

(Secretary), Nijmegen

VOLUME 6

THE VERB 'BE' AND ITS SYNONYMS PHILOSOPHICAL AND GRAMMATICAL STUDIES (2)

ESKIMO / HINDI/ZUNI/MODERN GREEK MALAYALAM/KURUKH

Edited by JOHN W. M. VERHAAR

D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY / DORDRECHT-HOLLAND

ISBN 978-94-015-2211-3

ISBN 978-94-015-3440-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-3440-6 1968 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means without permission from the publisher Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1968

EDITORIAL PREFACE

The present volume is the second of a series of studies analysing the verb 'to be' and/or synonyms in a number of languages. It is expected that these studies will provide some of the necessary foundational material for research in logic, the theory of knowledge, and ontology; and possibly in other philosophical disciplines. The concluding volume of the series will attempt to assess the linguistic and philosophical impact of all the contributions. There is no definite principle of arrangement of the contributions, which will be published in the order in which they reach the editor's desk. JOHN W. M. VERHAAR

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO, BY JACOB MEY

O. Introduction

1 2 2

1. The Problem of Universals and TO BE 1. Formal and Substantive Universals 2. Universality and Translatability 3. How to Find a Universal, Especially TO BE 2. TO BE in Greenlandic Eskimo 1. The Eskimo Language 2. The Material 3. Orthography and Phonemic Interpretation 4. TO BE-Suffixes and Verbs (in Greenlandic) 3. Discussion and Conclusions Bibliography

6 7 16 16 17 18 19 27 33

35

THE COPULA IN HINDI, BY YAMUNA KACHRU

35

I. Introduction II. Some Preliminaries of Hindi Syntax A. Simple Sentences in Hindi B. The Auxiliary Element C. Agreement Rules III. The Syntax of the Copula IV. Summary and Conclusion Selected Bibliography

36 36 39 41 44 57 58

ZUNI EQUIVALENTS OF ENGLISH 'TO BE', BY STANLEY NEWMAN

60

I. Zuni 'Teya' and the Zero Copula II. Other Static Verbs in Zuni III. Zuni Equivalents of the Passive and Progressive 'To Be' IV. Summary and Discussion

60 63

66 67 VII

TABLE OF CONTENTS THE MODERN GREEK VERBS OF 'BEING', BY KOSTAS KAZAZIS

I. II. III. IV.

Introduction The Verbs of 'Being' Copula with Noun Roles V. Copula with Adjective VI. Identity VII. Copula with Location VIII. Existence IX. Conclusion Bibliography

71 71 72 76 77 78 79 80 82 87 87

EXISTENTIAL, POSSESSIVE, LOCATIVE AND COPULATIVE SENTE NCES IN MALAY ALAM, BY R.E. ASHER

I. Introduction II. Some Features of Malayalam Grammar III. Malayalam Verbs of'Being' 1.

aat;l~

2. Ut;lt~ 3. aat;le and Ut;lt~ 4. irikkuka as a Verb of Being IV. Negatives of Being Verbs V. Transformations Involving Verbs of 'Being' 1. Adjectivalisation 2. Adverbialisation 3. Emphatic VI. 'Being' and 'Causing To Be' VII. Verbs of Being and Auxiliary Verbs VIII. Conclusion Bibliography

88 88

90 95 95

98 99 102 104 105 105 106 107 108 108

110 110

A GENERATIVE GRAMMAR OF KURUKH COPULA, BY DON R. VESPER

I. Introduction II. Development of the Grammar 1. Noun Phrase (NP) 2. Verb Phrase (VP) 3. The Auxiliary Verb (Aux) VIII

112 112 114 114 118 122

TABLE OF CONTENTS

III. The Copula 1. Background and Introduction 2. Stem Distribution in Detail 3. How the Copula Fits into the Grammar IV. A Copula Stem in an Auxiliary Usage

V. Appendix 1. Base Rules 2. Lexicon 3. Transformational Rules

Bibliography

130 130 133 138

141 142 144 144 147 147

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JACOB MEY

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

O.

INTRODUCTION

Recent work in semantic theory and information retrieval has brought up the old question of giving a general classification of concepts independently of particular languages (see e.g. Sparck-Jones 1964). On the other hand, recent developments in the theory of grammar are towards a maximally general form of the rules (cf. Katz and Fodor 1963; Chomsky 1965; Bach 1966 and 1967). In this connection, the often despised problem of linguistic universals has acquired new actuality (cf. Greenberg 1963; Weinreich 1963 and 1966). The present monograph 1 is an attempt to contribute to the standing discussion by analyzing the concept of TO BE as perceived through the linguistic filter of a language very differentfrom English and other well-known languages. The work presented here is part of current research in the syntactic structure of Eskimo, and forms a member of a series of monographs on TO BE in different languages. A certain uniformity inherent in the title of the series should not create any unwarranted expectations as to uniformity of content, nor should the author gain illegitimate credit for his work by the mere fact of belonging to a select group of authors. My results will be presented in a rather preliminary fashion; in particular, the line of approach was from the start rather biased towards the semantic aspects of the problem. The syntactical implications that presented themselves, however, turned out to be both numerous and important. The author feels that, without an extensive treatment of these matters, his work is intrinsically incomplete. Such a treatment, to the extent that it can be realized, will still be more a program for future research 1a than a promise of immediate results.

An earlier version of this paper (under the title Some Thoughts on Universals, especially with regard to the notion 'To Be' in Eskimo) was presented at the 65th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (5th Conference on American Indian Languages), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 18 November 1966. la For this, see my Syntax of Greenlandic Verbal Constructions (in preparation). 1

1 J. W. M. Verhaar (ed.), The Verb' Be' and its Synonyms 2, 1-34. All rights reserved.

JACOB MEY

1.

THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS AND 'TO BE'

1.1. Formal and Substantive Universals Chomsky (1965, 202) has connected universal translatability between natural languages with the existence of substantive universals, the latter being a necessary condition on the former. Applying this to our case, and inverting the implication, one could ask: is the existence of a universal TO BE in any way necessarily conditioned by the fact of universal translatability? In other words, do we have to establish the existence of parallel forms for TO BE in, say, English and Eskimo to be able to speak of a universal TO BE? Furthermore, granting that such forms have been shown to exist, are they of any value in proving that a universal TO BE must exist? In order to be able to answer these questions, let's briefly examine the issue of the substantive universals. First, the distinction between formal and substantive universals as proposed by Chomsky and his followers (see, e.g., Chomsky 1965, 28; Katz and Postal 1964, 160). Formal universals have to do with the form of statements used in linguistic descriptions, i.e. with the form of grammars and rules of the grammars: "they involve ... the character of the rules that appear in grammars and the ways in which they can be interconnected." (Chomsky, I.e.) Thus, a statement like the following: 'There exists a universal base (deep structure), common to all natural languages' is a formal universal, i.e., a statement about the form of a universal: the universal base. The universal base itself and, in particular, its rules, belong to the substantive universals; the same goes for, e.g., (the set of) grammatical categories of (a) language(s), the (universal set of) phonological (distinctive) features, or, in the present case (hopefully), TO BE. While the formal universals, strictly speaking, do not belong to the grammar of any language (they are statements about grammars, and belong thus to the linguistic metalanguage, i.e. the theory of grammars), the substantive universals have to do with the phonology, syntax and semantics of particular languages. Looking at the problem from this angle, we see that the existence of such substantively identical or related forms in different languages is a necessary condition for the existence of substantive universals; moreover, that it is the only condition we could possibly formulate. Clearly, the statement that linguistic units in any particular language are taken from a common stock of substantive universals cannot be proved or disproved in any way except by examining the particular languages. (Of course it is true that finding such units is not the same as defining a universal). As E. Bach puts it: "Obviously, there is no way to refute the statement that the universal set of categories comprises simply those which have been postulated for individual languages and which might 2

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

be postulated in the future" (1967, 31MS). I would like to add that there is no other way to prove such a statement, either. It follows that, in looking for a prospective universal in a particular language, we can disregard the distinction between formal and substantive, as defined by Chomsky: all universals of the kind we are trying to find are substantive, no matter whether they are taken from the realm of phonology, syntax or semantics. It may be true that syntactic units (the symbols of the intermediary alphabet, like NP, VP etc.), by virtue of their more abstract character often are thought of as more 'formal' than, say, terminal symbols, or phonological and semantic features. It should be kept in mind, however, that a symbol like NP, even though it belongs to the syntactic part of the grammar, and thus has to be interpreted both phonologically and semantically, is not to be equated with the symbols of e.g. a mathematical or a formal logical system. 2 S, NP, VP, N and V, characterized by Chomsky (1965, 73) as "grammatical universals", are nonetheless substantive, not formal universals: their more 'abstract' shape should not confuse us, nor lead us to believe that there 'is' an NP outside linguistic substance. (The distinction is obviously related to the difference between a purely formal system (as in mathematics) and an applied formal system (as in physics); for a discussion of this distinction (termed 'pure deductive' versus 'hypotheticodeductive' see Saumjan 1965, 64ff.) In any case, statements about a theory clearly belong to another level than statements inside (or, belonging to) the theory; and for this reason I will leave the formal universals in the sense of Chomsky outside the present discussion. Note that what has been said so far holds for all universals, semantic as well as syntactic and phonological; thus the only linguistically interesting way of discussing TO BE seems to be in terms of substantive universals. The next question we have to answer is, naturally: what precisely do we mean by a substantive universal, and what does it mean to say that TO BE possibly is such a universal? 'Substantive' is related to 'substance'; hence a substantive universal is one that has to do with the substance of the language. Now, unfortunately, the concept of linguistic substance has not been explicitly defined in the context of the above quotations from generative grammarians, unless one takes the dichotomy form-substance to correspond to that between 'linguistic theory' and 'linguistic description'. If we choose to do so, we cannot fruitfully discuss the notion of substance as relevant to our parThis supposed identity between a mathematical and a grammatical 'interpretative' system has resulted in a certain amount of distrust with regard to the symbols of the grammar: thus, I do not quite agree with P. Novak who claims that "accepting the meaning of the non terminal symbols to be defined by their position in the generative system, we unfortunately give up the general linguistic standpoint" (1966, 157; but see my reply in the review of his contribution (Mey 1968,69).

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ticular case: if, in fact, the description of a language only (or primarily) is concerned with substance, how could it possibly be universal in any other sense than that of (in some vague and undefined way) 'belonging to all languages'? It might thus appear that the 'true' universals are the formal ones (Chomsky hesitates to accept the existence of substantive universals common to all languages, cf. the remark on universal translatability quoted above). On the other hand, since what we refer to, in some rather pedestrian sense, is the only universal (being our universe of reference, by a necessary, though not too intelligible existential fact), and since linguistic units (again in a rather crass sense) 'refer to' something, one might believe that true universality per se resides in the substance, per accidens only in the abstract notions that we call the units of descriptive linguistics. Of course this is equally false; to quote E. Bach, "the truth must lie somewhere between these two extremes" (1967, 31MS). The question is: just where? Before I try to answer this question, I will briefly examine another attempt to solve the form-substance problem. Louis Hjelmslev, in various works (e.g. 1943; 1953, 31-2; 1959 (1938), 137), has emphasized the formal nature of language (formal is taken here in a sense different from that discussed above, as will appear). It is interesting to note, as Eli Fischer-Jorgensen remarks (1966, 8ff.), that the distinction between form and substance of Hjelmslev's later works (as applied to both the content and the expression planes) has not always been so clearly defined. I cannot go into terminological detail here; let it suffice to say the following: while substance originally was thought of as being amorphous, not intelligible (more or less like the materia prima of Scholastic terminology), in the later works it is considered as 'shaped' (in/ormata, the School would say) by the linguistic form; the English translation of Hjelmslev's main work uses purport for this 'formed' substance, whereas 'substance' refers to the non-linguistically relevant reality (the psychological, anthropological, zoological or other areas that one used to refer to, with not a little contempt, as 'extralinguistic'). The question is now: why did Hjelmslev want to establish a purport that was different from substance? Apparently because he wanted to safeguard his dictum that language is "une forme organisee entre deux substances" (1959, 137)3, while at the same time he intended to preserve his basic belief that language is a semiotic process into which all other semiotic systems can be translated (1943, 97; 1953, 70). This translatability is said to "rest on the fact that natural languages, and they alone, are capable of forming any substance [of the content, JM] whatsoever" (ibid.). The idea that the same substance is formed differently in different languages, creating language-unique purports (= This quotation is always said to go back to Saussure, but an explicit indication where to find it in the Master's works is never provided.

3

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ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

formed substances), would permit us to abstract away from the individual differences of substance-form between particular languages, and establish a universal reference point (in this case, for the content; a similar argument could be construed for the expression plane). In the next section (1.2.), I will comment on this universal translatability hypothesis and its consequences; to conclude the present discussion, let us consider briefly the implications of this form-substance distinction for our purposes: the establishing of a universal unit TO BE. According to glossematic terminology, a particular linguistic sign (Le., per definition, a unilingual unit) consists of content and expression, each of these having a form and a substance (for a lucid interpretation of these dichotomies, see Eli Fischer-Jorgensen's above-mentioned article). The signs representing TO BE in a particular language (e.g. Greenlandic Eskimo) cannot be identified directly in any way with the signs of other languages representing (by hypothesis) TO BE. The reason is that both form and substance of the content are defined in relation to the particular sign to which they belong (just as is the expression side of the same sign). A 'universal linguistic sign' is a contradiction in itself; the same goes for a universal linguistic substance (i.e. purport, cf. above). This, of course, does not exclude the possibility of similarities between languages as far as purport is concerned (cf. below, 1.3.2.): but to establish a true universal seems to imply, by the same token, the establishment of an abstract unit, i.e. a unit that does not belong to any particular language. Can these abstract units be found, and can they be defined in any linguistically meaningful way? I cannot answer this question at this point, but let me point out, preliminarily, that the most recent trends in modern grammatical theory seem to favor the setting up of abstract categories as grammatical universals, and that 'deep structure' is thought of as consisting of (quasi-)logical operators (like quantifiers) and relations, rather than of particular, concrete units (for suggestions, see Weinreich 1963 and 1966; Bach 1967). It should be emphasized that, while in generative terminology these units still belong to the category of substantive universals, they cannot be said to be either formal or substantive in the terminology of glossematics. For lack of a suitable adjective going with 'purport' one might use the term 'substantial' here, and retain 'substantive' to denote the 'unformed' substance; in this latter sense, universals are substantive, also in Hjelmslev's terminology, but not 'substantial'. E. Bach remarks (1967, 29MS) that one should not simply identify logical operators with particular linguistic units (in the context: syntactic relations). True though this may be, it is nevertheless the case that the linguistic evidence that might be invoked to justify a particular identification belongs to a particular language, thus making a generalization strictly speaking impossible. In other words, as soon as one descends from the celestial empyreum

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of logic one gets entangled in the terrestrial mess of particular languages: hunting down a universal in the scrub and brush of exotic parlances may well prove to be a time-consuming and painful task. 1.2. Universality and Translatability

Leaving aside for the moment whether or not complete intertranslatability can be realized in natural languages, it is certainly not too much to affirm that something can be translated from one language into some other, and that translatability is one of the practical ways we have to discover semantic universality. This does not mean that the semantics of a language are determined by the various degrees of translatability (e.g. word-to-word, or even sentence-to-sentence), but rather that we have a certain guarantee for common semantic substance, formed in a particular, individually determined way for individual languages. I will now put forward the following, preliminary hypothesis, and, on the basis of that hypothesis, suggest some kind of a method (both to be made more precise in the next section): The less a linguistic unit (word, phrase or more complex unit) is affected by intra-( = uni-)lingual selectional restraints, and the less the intralingual selectional restraints are carried over (or even compounded) interlingually (e.g. in translation), the more universal that unit will be. As an obvious example, consider the English conjunction and. There are few contextual restrictions on this word (cf. Harris' example He picked up the pins and the needles and the double bass (1962, 8-9», and in most cases translation (even into, say, West Greenlandic Eskimo) will not make and incur additional restrictions (in fact, there may well be even fewer in Eskimo). But when we try to translate e.g. English runs, we are faced with a problem: if the English context is the boy , then our Greenlandic equivalent , then it is panga/igpoq. This is arpagpoq; if, however, it is the dog is because of a contextual restraint in Greenlandic: nukagpiaraq arpagpoq 'the boy runs' is a well-formed sentence, but not so *qingmeq arpagpoq (the latter, if possible at all, would perhaps evoke a vision of a dog running on two legs). A few words of caution are in order. First, the method (in its rather crude form, as propagated here, 'add some context and see what happens when you translate') has to be refined, before it will give reliable results (see next section); adding words without regard to any possible (surface or deep) structure will not do. This brings up the next point: the method is not defined as being either semantic, or syntactic, per se; consequently, it can be used in both areas (and in phonology as well, supposed one thinks of phonological purport as what 6

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

is being 'translated'); but again, examining isolated units with respect to their possible contextual restraints is only the beginning. This leads us to the following observation: to each prospective universal, 'discovered' according to the crude technique sketched above, there should be added a preliminary tag: 'with respect to the language(s) examined'. In order to remove this tag, some might make the (presumably unrealistic) claim that the universal in question had been established after a thorough examination of all the world's languages, past and present (not to speak of the future). Others would contend that a true universal, worthy of that name, belongs to Language Itself, not just to its vicissitudinous representatives, the individual languages : otherwise our universals would be nothing more than the results of hypostasizing some greatest common denominators on a certain level. However, scholars like Saussure, Hjelmslev and others have emphasized many times the necessity of describing linguistic units immanently, i.e. as parts of the system of a particular language, without undue regard to other systems. Naturally, the question then can be asked if, and how, one can define the system of Language, and, in particular, if, and how, universals (like the hopeful TO BE) belong to such a system. The next section will try to shed some light on these matters. 1.3. How to Find a Universal, Especially TO BE 1.3.1. Universality and Similarity

To revert to the theme of Section 1.1, we might say that the only safe (substantive) universal assertion about languages is their intertranslatability. Does this imply anything like: universals exist, we only have to find ways and means to discover them? In other words: is there a discovery procedure for universals, based on common reference? Note first that reference in itselfis by no means a univocal concept. In the sphere of semantics, it may comprise anything from a simple answer-eliciting technique of pointing-at-objects to intricate discussions of kinship terms amongst anthropologists. Syntactic structures, on the other hand, can be said to refer to content substance in a different way, but the question of universality is still legitimately posed (see Bach 1966). Moreover, as everybody knows, the distinction between lexicon and syntax is by no means an easy one to make in practice. To facilitate the discussion, I will start with the very simple assumption made in Section 1.2., that there is something about which we can talk in different languages. If x is such a thing, then we call x a prospective universal. (And of course vice versa). More precisely: iff there is an x such that Yl"'" Yn are well-formed (strings of) symbols in languages L 1 , .'" Ln refer7

JACOB MEY

ring to x, then x is a universal with respect to languages L 1 , •.• , Ln. Thus a very weak claim of translatability is equivalent to an existence postulate for some x. Note also that we need not restrict x (or its existence) to objects of the physical world: the definition holds equally of syntactic relations (interpreting 'referring to 'as' expressing') or syntactic symbols (interpreting 'referring to' as 'dominating a' or 'including an occurrence of'). It is hard to imagine what 'complete identity of reference' would mean (depending also, of course, on the interpretation of 'reference'). If we think of it in terms of translatability, it would mean that expressions Yi and Yj could be interchanged under translation from language L; to L j and vice versa, for every occurrence of Y;, Yj. Assuming that there is such a thing as complete intertranslatability, this would mean that for every given YiEL;, there would have to be a YjEL j with identical reference. Now this claim has no immediate linguistic interest: suppose that e.g. Yi is just one single word in language L; and that Yj is a paragraph in a dictionary, giving the L j equivalent of y;. This is essentially the situation we are confronted with when we look up the Greenlandic equivalents of words like bureaucrat, demarcation line or subjective in a dictionary: what we get is a paragraph, a rendering, not just one word (see example below). However, one should distinguish between what is feasible, translation wise, and what is interesting, linguistically speaking. Admitting that the distinction to a great extent is determined by personal or other bias, I think that nevertheless everybody will agree that translation is easier, the more the two expressions Yi and Yj are similar (perhaps in a very vulgar sense, e.g. with regard to number of words per expression). Chomsky calls translation claims 'unreasonable' (1965, 202) if encyclopedic knowledge is involved or presupposed; and BarHillel (1964, 74) doubts that even sentences can be considered to be "large enough units" for translatability. Obviously, what we need is some grading of similarity between representations of prospective universals: the more similar a particular Yi to a particular Yj' the less complicated one's translation procedure will be. In most cases, there is no absolute similarity (not even when taking a word from one language and adding it to another language), as we shall see in a moment. This absence of complete similarity between representations of universals is precisely one of the arguments against feasibility of 'complete translation'; however, similarity, or absence of similarity, at least if confined to a certain level, does not prove, or disprove, translatability by itself. Only if similarity is understood in the sense of the discussion above (section 1.1.: the way a language forms its content substance) can it be said to be relevant to the present issue of universal translatability. 8

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

1.3.2. Reference Similarity and Borrowing

In order to illustrate the concept of similarity of reference (in the sense just described), I will take as an example the fact of interlingual borrowing. First, however, the following distinction should be made: similarity of content reference: what does a particular universal refer to? similarity of expression reference: how does this (content) reference take place (by means of a word, a phrase, a sentence, perhaps an encyclopedia article)? Here, too, the phonological shape of the word etc. can be taken into account, but, apart from the few examples below, I will not consider phonological similarity relevant to the present discussion. As examples, consider the following: Complete similarity in content and expression (with the reservation made above, and cf. next page) obtains between a word of a particular language and its borrowed replica in some other language. This happens frequently when words from 'world languages' like English are taken over by other, more remote idioms: hot dog in Norwegian could be an example (barring the peculiarities of Norwegian pronunciation, and - in the semantic field the opinion of those who think that hot dogs are better in Norway than anywhere else in the world). Full similarity in content (at least in the intention of the missionaries), partial similarity only in expression: the Greenlandic word for 'God': gate (Danish Gud). As an example of partial similarity in both content and expression one could consider the word sputnik in English, used to render a particular sense of the Russian word for 'companion, fellow-traveller'. The borrowing, with resulting productivity in English of the second half (the derivation morpheme), gives us an example of an even further reduced similarity: -nik (or -nick) in the following English words could hardly be identified with its Russian counterpart, semantically, or said to be even remotely similar to it: sicknick (patient at a spa), wishnick (wishing doll), mitnik (person from MIT or devoted to MIT methods), peacenick, lovenick, vietnik, and of course the older beatnik, which by now seems completely assimilated. I intimated above that complete similarity was a thing not likely to be found. An even stronger statement can be made: identity (complete similarity) between a borrowed expression and its 'parent' exists at best at the moment of borrowing only (this holds for natural languages; Bar-Hillel's thought-experiment (1964, 56) of adding the total vocabulary of English to some primitive language thus creates a momentary similarity only, strictly speaking). A person, or a whole language community, may adopt a word from a foreign language; invariably, the result will be that the word after a

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certain time changes its meaning, like the other words of the adopting language, but typically unlike the original word in the mother language. So that even in these instances, what seems to be a complete identity, has to be glossed: 'only valid at moment of borrowing'. A final remark: giving these examples, I did not want to make it appear as if the problem of reference similarity were uniquely (or even primarily) confined to diachronicallinguistics: it should be clear that the new meaning(s) are just as 'real' as the original one(s): the etyma of universals are by no means an etymological issue only.

1.3.3. Degrees of Similarity To return to the distinction made above, we evidently cannot expect any interlingual similarity on the phonemic level 4 (except, to a certain degree, for accidental similarity due to borrowing and onomatopoeia): hence, we decide to disregard this kind of similarity. Neither should we be impressed by the existence of word-for-word (generally: unit-for-unit) interlingual equivalents: that, in itself, is no measure of the kind of similarity we are looking for. As an example, take the word democracy: is it really relevant that we can express this concept by one word in such different languages as English and Greenlandic? Note that it does not really matter that Greenlandic demokrati is a loan from Danish. Suppose a five-word Greenlandic equivalent of the international one-wordexpression existed; could this not then be said to be the expression, just as well, of the same single concept? The answer to this question depends on what we mean by 'equivalent', and this brings us to a discussion of the other half of the distinction: similarity in content. To make the point clear, let us ask: what is the difference between the entry demokratf and its predecessor under the caption demokrati in DGO (s.v.): niilagauvfip niilagkersorneqarnera inungnit kikunitdlunit oqausigssaqarfigineqartoq 'the being governed of the country by the authority of the common people'? Clearly, while one is a word, the other is a definition: they are not interchangeable in any context (except for that of a dictionary or a crossword puzzle). But suppose now the Greenlandic expression had been of the type human being (person) in English. Of course these are two-word expressions, in contrast e.g. to German Mensch, but the content in both is not much different: cf. He is such afine human being vs. Er ist solch ein guter Mensch. Examples of this kind could be easily multiplied: the problem they bring up is in fact identical with that formulated in the head of this section: Of course this does not preclude the issue of finding phonological universals; but these have nothing to do with the existence of symmetric (content-expression) similarities between languages like the ones described here.

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ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

to what degree are two (several) expressions from different languages equivalent, i.e. similar in content reference? The question is very close to that posed in information retrieval and in semantic classification in general: given a multiple reference, how to choose the one that is best adapted to a particular purpose? Constructing a thesaurus is a practical application of the principle of similarity of reference: "if we accept that a thesaurus is a conceptual classification, it would seem that we can regard the heads as interlingual" (Sparck-Jones 1964, I.l4). Such interlingual 'heads', if they can be found, constitute areas of similarity of reference; they are at the basis of any attempt at translation. In semantic classification the usual questions are: how much is required of environment in order to determine the 'right' conceptual reference? And: how many different environments can be distinguished that are characteristic for a particular reference? Taking 'environment' and its definition for granted - intuitively: a certain, naturally limited, linguistically relevant (e.g. phonemic, morphemic, syntactic) frame of description, such as word, phrase, sentence etc. - we are now ready for a more profound analysis of the example given in Section 1.2. Let us suppose that some similarity of reference is established between English runs and French court, and again, that there is given some similarity between the dog and Ie chien. We want to determine the degree of similarity between runs and court. Suppose now we 'discover' the English sentence the dog runs, and that we want to know if the similarity between runs and court that already has been established is affected by the occurrence of runs in the context the dog . To answer this question, we look for the word in French that we know has a similar content reference as the dog: Ie chien. We then try to form the sentence: Ie chien court, and find this to be a correct sentence in French. Hence the similarity of runs-court is not influenced by this environment. I shall now make the following generalization: the degree of similarity between expressions in different languages decreases with the amount of context that is relevant for translatability. Thus, universality of expressions and their context sensibility are inversely proportionate: the absolute universal is context free, the 'zero universal' is maximally context sensitive. In our example, the concept 'run' did not have to be changed, for French, when we added the particular environment 'dog': there were no contextual features 5 that blocked the translation of runs by court in our particular environment. That this is not always or necessarily the case may be seen from the 5 Note that 'contextual features' is used here to denote both (strict) subcategorization and selectional features (as proposed by Chomsky, e.g. 1965,93; Ill), not for subcategorization only (as erroneously implied by Montgomery in her review of Bach (1964), (1965, 643-5)).

11

JACOB MEY

example quoted above in section 1.2. Suppose that we want to do a translation into Greenlandic of The dog runs. Trusting a dictionary to give us at least a certain amount of interlingual similarity, we can look up the words dog and runs, and find, respectively, qingmeq and panga/igpoq. The sentence qingmeq panga/igpoq being well-formed in Greenlandic, we might assume that panga/igpoq, since it translates runs successfully in this particular context, will do so in other contexts as well. However, if we substituted the boy for the dog in the English sentence, and (by reference to either a dictionary, a native speaker, or other contexts) obtained a correct translation for the boy (nukagpiaraq), we would still not be able to construct a well-formed Greenlandic sentence on the basis of this information: *nukagpiaraq panga/igpoq is not a correct translation of the boy runs; it has to be nukagpiaraq arpagpoq, as we have seen above. Conclusion: the concept 'run' in Greenlandic is sensitive to contexts like the ones discussed. Rather than attribute this to contextual features, one could include this information in the (contextsensitive) selectional features (cf. Chomsky 1965, 115) in the matrices for arpagpoq, panga/igpoq (e.g. 'Human-Animate', plus-minus, respectively). For the Danish or English expressions of 'run' this feature need not be specified: both languages would just have one single feature ('Animate'), at least as far as this example is concerned. Since the semantic matrix of 'run' in Greenlandic contains one more feature than the corresponding English one, the concept of 'run' is less universal in Greenlandic. 6 One could continue this experiment ad libitum, both with regard to the languages involved and to the length of the context required to make a univocal decision which translation to use. For example, one could substitute Ie gar(:on for the boy, and obtain a correct French sentence, keeping court as the equivalent of runs. Since Ie chien court is correct French, too, 'run' is not context-sensitive in French (with regard to this particular feature, 'Human-Animate'). For running objects ('Non-Animate') one would have to operate a distinction: the train runs is all right in English, but French trains circulent, and the Greenlandic qimugtuitsut 7 ingerdldput. In the following these notions are expressed somewhat more precisely. Let Yi be an expression (a string of symbols) in L i : YiELi; similarly, let YjEL j ; and let S symbolize a two place relation of similarity; furthermore, Yi andYj are such that S(Yi' Yj) holds (Yi is similar to y). Let Y;' ELi' and let YiY;' be a well-formed phrase of L i , in the following sense: 6 Of course, this has nothing to do, per se, with the question if Greenlanders conceive of 'run' as an universal idea, in the philosophical, athletic or other senses of the word. Thus, any Whorfian implications are unintentional on the part of the author. 7 qimugtoq is that which draws the sledge (dog) or the carriage (horse), the suffix -ipoq (not the same as that for 'to be' below) means 'being without'. One wonders why we didn't call a train an automobile, in the first place.

12

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

YiY/ is a wf phrase ELi iff there is an /; such that /;E(li n Y'i), where /; is some semantic feature, and li, Y/ are the sets of semantic features associated withYi'Y/ (these sets can be understood in the sense of readings as defined by Katz and Postal (1964, p. 13); li n Y/ is to be understood as "the set of all features that belong both to li and to Y/". Now, we can formulate the following condition on context independency for the similarity between Yi and Yj: S(Yi' yJ is context-free iff for all Y/ ELJ , S(y/, Y/) implies that YjY/ is a wf phraseELj . Or, equivalently, S(Yi' Yj) is context-free iff Vy'j[3fj(fjE(Yj n Y'j) Afj=/;)J. The last part of the condition is added to ensure that it is the same selectional feature that governs well-formedness of the phrase in Li as well as that of the phrase in L j. This result can be generalized to comprise longer contexts and more languages; intuitively, the more I can add of context to a certain expression without incurring selectional restrictions under translation, the more similar my original expression is to its counterpart(s) in (an)other language(s), i.e. the more universal it will be. As indicated above (Section 1.2.), this explains the universal character of words like and that preserve similarity crosslanguagewise, no matter how much context is added on either side. For any particular language, where similarity holds trivially (any expression is similar to itself) we have to worry about the contextual restrictions only: that is, the more selectional features a particular unit possesses, the less universal it will be. The question here can simply be asked as: will well-formedness be preserved if I add this particular context, or will it not? Again, the example of and seems to be instructive: there do not appear to be any contextual restrictions on this word (apart from those imposed by its syntactic properties), irrespective of which particular language we are considering. Looking at the problem from a different angle, we could ask: what conditions determine the contexts that a particular word occurs in, and do they have any relevance for the universality question? In other words, consider now not the length of the context to be added to a particular expression, but rather the different contexts that a particular expression will admit. For example, in many languages there are certain ways of expressing (physical) time, and adverbial expressions of time should agree with these, or, at least, not disagree. Thus, even though one may translate I will come tomorrow by Ich werde morgen kommen, there is also the correct German expression Ich komme morgen (whose direct English equivalent *1 come tomorrow is deviant), while it is impossible (both in English and in German) to say something like *1 come yesterday. Let us now turn to Greenlandic, and say that we want 13

JACOB MEY

the Greenlandic for The Eskimos are attacked. One possible equivalent would be: inuit sorssugfigissauput. Imagine now that we want to check the different possible surroundings for these phrases and try some adverbs of time, like yesterday, long ago, tomorrow, some time etc. The English sentence would have to be changed in most of the cases: one could not say, e.g., *long ago, the Eskimos are attacked. Note now that this is precisely what can be said in Greenlandic: itsaroq inuit sorssugfigissauput 'in olden times, they say, the Eskimos are attacked's (where itsaq is the time adverbial, -guuq a mere 'quotative' suffix). In other words, the Greenlandic expression is less sensitive to this context (and other, similar ones) than are the German or English counterparts: there are more (different) environments in which the Greenlandic sentence can occur. The case of Greenlandic is thus different also from German (where one can say Ich werde morgen kommen, if one wants to stress the future character of the coming, or perhaps just for emphasis). It would be only partly correct, though, to explain these facts by referring to the fact that Greenlandic never expresses time: apart from the adverbials, it also possesses verbal forms that denote tense, but these occur in subordinate clauses only (see below, 3.3.). Quite another case is the following. In English we have verbs like to perpetrate. This verb is almost exclusively connected with the idea of some excessively criminal action: offenses are committed, so are felonies; one perpetrates atrocious crimes and the like. This verb is thus context-restricted in the sense that it does admit of very few environments. The fact that these expressions often are easy to translate (cf. French perphrer un crime, German ein Verbrechen veriiben, where perpetrer, resp. veriiben underlie more or less the same restrictions as the English verb) should not confuse the universal issue. True, a verb like perpetrate is so heavily loaded with contextual restraints that it actually is easier to say what it can go with than what it cannot. One might even ask if perpetrate should not rather be regarded as some special realization (dependent on the context) of some other, more universal concept (e.g. 'do'). Easy translatability is thus not a sign of universality, by itself; sometimes, however, it is one of its consequences (cf. the example above of and and discussion below, 3.2). Also, in the vocabularies of many of the sciences we have numerous instances where linguistic units have very limited and well-defined references: for many languages, a word like atom has easy-to-find equivalents. But the fact that these words and phrases are easy to translate is not crucial: we should rather examine their behavior under the test described in the present section, to find that they admit of context adding and context changing while preserving similarity under trans8 The sentence is found in koo. III, 124 (for explanation of this and similar abbreviations, see below, Section 2.2).

14

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

lation, and thus actually do present a relatively high degree of interlingual similarity. 9 On closer examination, the criterion of different contexts in different languages can be reduced to a series of operations as described in the discussion of the criterion of similar context in different languages. All we have to do is to repeat the comparison procedure for every new language pair. Conversely, instead of generalizing in the direction of more languages, we can narrow down to a particular one, in order to determine just what surroundings a given word or phrase can have, and how, as a prospective universal, it fits into the pattern of its own language. As an example, consider the Greenlandic equivalents of English to do, Frenchfaire. We start with an interlingual examination of the French and English verbs' possible contexts and their similarity. While there are numerous contexts where the two languages cover each other, like in do this-fais {:a, do business-faire du commerce, and even the much-despised do Europefaire ['Europe, there are a number of instances where do cannot be rendered by faire (do a song, a paper), and an even greater number wherefaire cannot be said to even remotely correspond to do: faire ['amour, Ie touriste, une demarche, un discours etc. Many (though not all) of these cases permit an English rendering by make: love, a step, a speech. Again, many of the uses of to make can be said to correspond to faire in the sense of 'to manufacture' (faire un habit, make a suit). Thus, abstracting from other correspondences, we find two English verbs, where French has only one, for a given, rather large number of pairwise similar but otherwise different environments. The question now arises: what exactly do we mean in saying (concluding from our hypothesis) that French jaire is more universal than either English do or English make? In a rather naive way, we could make a statement like the following: assuming that there is something we can talk about in French as well as in English, making use of faire and do, or faire and make, respectively, then the French expression is more comprehensive than either of the English ones: the way it forms the particular section of the universe of reference into a linguistic content unit is less restricted than in English. Which amounts to saying that, in the case of do, we have to incorporate a larger number of selectional rules (cf. Chomsky, 1965,111) into the grammar than in the case offaire. Turning to Greenlandic, the first thing we discover is that the notions of 'do' and 'make' normally are expressed by means of a suffix: -lior-, with its various allomorphs (see Bergsland 1955, 50.3). Exx.: qiiniorpoq 'he makes a qajaq', putdlasiorpoq 'he makes a trap' (koo. III, 3), atiliorta 'let's make names' (in 9 A practical illustration of this hypothesis may be seen in the relative success of early, rather crude MT programs for handling scientific texts.

15

JACOB MEY

the snow) (alt. I, 12). As one sees, the suffix is added to nominal stems in the examples: qajaq, putdlat, ateq: the suffix is said to be denominal, i.e. it turns nouns into verbs. What appears, in English or French, as a direct object, is in Greenlandic the morphological head of the construction.1° One way of expressing 'do' (rather than 'make') as an independent verb would be the following: in Greenlandic, we have the (semi-independent) verb £poq (-£poq) meaning 'to be' (on this verb see below, Sections 2.4.2. and 3.2.). This verb has (contrary to normal) a derivate with -lior-: iliorpoq, meaning 'to do; to bring about a state' (cf. ilivoq 'to be in a state', see 2.4.2.). This verb is subject to the same heavy contextual restrictions as is [poq (and its derivates, like ilivoq; for details, see 2.4.2.). One of the possible contexts is with qanoq'how': tamana qanoq iliordlune anguneqasava 'this/how/bringing about/will one attain?' i.e. 'what to do in order to attain this goal?' (A/G 102: 22 (1962),3). Note that again the 'direct object', if present, is not expressed by the morphological means of referential number (as is done usually in Greenlandic); if such an 'object reference' is present, it concerns the person for whom something is being made, not the object that is manufactured: qiiniorpa 'he makes a qajaqfor him', qanoq iliorpase 'what did he do towards you (pl.)?'. One sees from these examples that the kind of restrictions that operate in Greenlandic are totally different from those that I have outlined for English and French; following Chomsky's terminology (1965, 93ff.), I would say that the restrictions in English on do or make (as in French onfaire) are of the selectional kind, whereas in Greenlandic one might describe them in terms of strict subcategorization rules. In view of the great complexity of the issue (not only for this case, but for Greenlandic syntax as a whole), it is perhaps wise to wait until more data are available before forming an ultimate hypothesis. At least we can say that we have to do, in this particular case, with a less universal case of 'content-expression solidarity' (cf. Hjelmslev 1953, 29ff.), universality being recognized, according to our hypothesis, by conservation of similarity under translation.

2.

'TO BE' IN GREENLANDIC ESKIMO

2.1. The Eskimo Language The Eskimo dialect of West Greenland from which the examples are taken is the official language (along with Danish) of the Danish amt (province) of Greenland. Besides West Greenlandic, other dialects of Eskimo spoken in 10 Of course, it is not the head of the construction in the sense defined by Bloomfield (1933, 195): clearly, this concept is altogether insufficient for Greenlandic syntax.

16

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

Greenland include North and East Greenlandic, but none of these has been studied as extensively, or over a comparable amount of time; the first written records of West Greenlandic date back to the early 18th century, and continue all the way down to our days. The language also has an extensive modern (mostly newspaper and school text book) literature; the older indigenous literary production of orally transmitted and eventually transcribed sagas has not yet been matched by a modern literature in the strict sense of the word. The Greenlandic dialects belong, together with the Canadian and part of the Alaskan Eskimo dialects, to the Eastern group of Eskimo languages. Despite the distances that separate these dialects, the amount of uniformity (and even mutual intelligibility) is great; thus the dialect analyzed in the present study can be said to be representative not only of the Greenlandic dialects, but also of many other dialects in the Eastern group. The dialects of the Western group (comprising the South West Alaskan and the Asiatic Eskimo dialects; see Hammerich 1936, 12; Bergsland 1955, Iff. for details), though closely related to the other dialects, do not permit a uniform treatment with these; much work has yet to be done towards the unified description of the Western dialects as such, and towards the codification of Eskimo-Aleut linguistic unity, established first by Bergsland (see e.g. 1962, lO09ff.). The description of the Aleut dialects is still in its initial stage (see Bergsland 1959), and any generalizations are necessarily tentative (see Bergsland 1967). The material drawn upon in the present study consists mainly of texts from the older literature, transcribed and edited (by Rink et al.) for the first time in 1888 and following years. Newspaper texts and school books have been taken into consideration to a lesser degree, the former exclusively to underscore trends in the development of Greenlandic into a 'modern' language, wherever necessary and feasible. Dictionary examples have occasionally been used. 2.2. The Material

As stated above, the approach to our subject has been, from the beginning, mainly semantic. This apparently innocent statement conceals a host of problems, some of which will be touched upon in later sections of this paper; a more elaborate treatment is in preparation. The following abbreviations are used to refer to Greenlandic texts throughout the work (for other references, see Bibliography, page 33-4, below). att.: Aa. Bugge and A. Lynge, atuainiutitat [New Reader] I-III, Nfik (Godthaab) 1934-44. koo.: K. Lynge (ed.), kalatdlit oqalugtuait oqalualavilo [Greenlandic Stories and Saga Tales] I-III, Nilk 1938-9. 17

JACOB MEY

AIG:

AtuagagdliutitlGronlandsposten (semi-monthly published at Nfik

(Godthaab) since 1860) Bergsland (1955) (see Bibliography) Rasmussen (1888) (see Bibliography) GDO: Greenlandic-Danish Dictionary (see Bibliography) DGO: Danish-Greenlandic Dictionary (see Bibliography). The arrangement of the Greenlandic material is by morphological categories (suffixes and verbs); a few remarks of a more general nature have been incorporated at the end of each section. For a complete discussion of the results, see below, Section 3; for a justification of the method, cf. in particular 3.1. and above, 1.3. B.: R.:

2.3. Orthography and Phonemic Interpretation

Most forms are given in the official Greenlandic orthography (with the exception of q, replacing the printed small capital K). For the sake of clarity a phonemic transcription is sometimes used (based on Bergsland 1955). The following special spelling features should be noted: ]I (a capped vowel letter) is used for vowel length (lVV/); vC denotes consonant length (jVCCj); vc means: both the vowel and the consonant are long (jVVCCj). In the orthography, five vowel letters are used: i, e, a, 0, u; phonemically, only the following three vowels are distinguished: Iii, lal, lui. The sounds written as e, 0 are combinatory variants of Iii, lui, respectively. q is the symbol for a uvular stop [q]; ng stands for [IJ]; r is a uvular fricative [B]; ss = [n Owing to historical processes of assimilation, vowel digrams often stand for long vowels: e.g. au (ao)=/aa/; consonant digrams often stand for long consonants: e.g. gp=/pp/; rq=/qq/, etc. Flat spirants (i.e. fricatives with the exception of sibilants) are voiced intervocalically; when lengthened, as a result of either purely phonetic (assimilatory) or morphophonemic (e.g. geminating) changes, they become voiceless (note that Ijl does not occur doubled). The orthography may often seem misleading: thus tdl represents 1111 = [i:] (long unvoiced lateral spirant); g is Igl, phonetically [y], but gt is Ittl = [t:], while Iggl is [X:], written gg. (For conditions on allophones, see Bergsland 1955, §§3-4.) The phonemic status of Iii versus fjf will not be discussed here; I follow Bergsland's phonemic transcription, which recognizes both phonemes (his Ijl is spelt [y]). The same goes for lui and Iv I; the latter phoneme is realized as [ v], against earlier [w]. 18

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

A complete treatment of Greenlandic phonemics and morphophonemics requires mention to be made of the so-called fourth vowel phoneme in Eskimo. This phoneme, whose existence is amply documented in older sources, has now almost everywhere in the Eastern dialects coalesced with Iii. The study of Greenlandic morphophonemics, however, clear· ly shows that what is now Iii was originally two distinct phonemes; some of the dialects (like those spoken by the Nunamiut Eskimo of Alaska) still have four vowel phonemes (see Bergsland 1955; 1957). Pending a more complete investigation of the material, I will not go into these matters, but transcribe uniformly Iii in all case where a phonemic transcription is required. 2.4. TO BE-Suffixes and Verbs

2.4.1.

-U-,

Denominal: Very Frequent, Unrestricted Suffix

After certain suffixes only, it permits transitivizing: 'making, causing to be .. .'. Exx.: (seasons, weather etc.) ukiugame 'when it was winter' (ukioq) att. II, 248 igpagssaungmat 'when it was yesterday' (igpagssaq) koo. I, 12 sikuvoq 'it is ice-covered' (e.g., the bay) (siko 'ice') GDO (place, time etc.) aitsiingungmat 'since it was to be the first time' koo. III, 41 (aitsat 'never before') koo. III, 48 sujugdliuvdlugit 'while (she) was in front of them' (tr.) (sujugdleq 'foremost') koo. III,40 qutdliuvdlutik 'while they were farthest out' (intr.)

(qutdleq) (state, quality, office)

koo. I, 13

att. I, 9 GDO

nukagpiarangugatdlarama 'when I was a little boy' (nukagpiaranguaq) qaqortuvoq 'it is white' (qaqortoq) palasiuvoq 'he is a minister' (palase).

The suffix .!.ngor- (/-!]!]ur-/) 'beginning to be' has much the same distribution, e.g.:

att. II, 248

utorqarssuangorame 'when she had begun to be very old' (utorqaq)

cf. utorqarssuvoq 'he is very old'; also, aitsiingungmat (above). 19

JACOB MEY

One should not confuse sikuvoq, which is a regular verb (siku- 'be frozen') with sikuvoq, above. Cf. also: aft. II, 248

qaungmat 'when it was daylight' (qauk; qauvoq).

These cases will be treated in detail below (2.4.7.).

aft. II, 247

R.,119

(comparative and superlative; with -neq) angneruvoq 'he is bigger' (angivoq 'is big') angnerussumigdlo 'and by being bigger (than anything else)' i.e. 'most of all' (with pronouns and adverbs) uvangauvunga 'it's me' (uvanga) kinauvut 'who are you' (kina 'who') tassauvoq 'there it is' (tassa) (with locative case -me; very frequent, meaning: 'lives in'; also nominal: 'inhabitant of') Nungmiuput 'they live in Nfik (Godthaab)'.

2.4.2. -it- (Both as a Suffix and as a Semi-Suffixed Verb: (-) ipoq Heavily restricted: only occurrences with certain demonstrative adverbs and nominal cases expressing quality, manner, location. Exx.:

GDO

koo. III, 55

AjG 102:22 (1962), 4 koo. III, 130 koo. III, 137

qanoq-ipa 'how is he?' (qanoq; in Moulton's terminology (1947, 226), no (-K-) or half-open (-N-) juncture) qanoq-issusia 'his being how' i.e. (they asked him) 'how did he feel' (it- and the suffix !.ssuseq, a verbal noun) taimaitoq (taima 'thus') 'it been thus' i.e. 'enough; all right; nevertheless' etc. (used adverbially) taimaitdlutik 'they (or: things) being like that' i.e. 'under those circumstances' aningaussat Danmarkimiput 'the money is in Denmark' (locative case) i/uanitut inugpagssuit 'the crowd of people that was inside it' (iluane: 'in its inside' (i/o)) tassanititdlune 'while he was there' (tassa).

The connected, usually suffixed, verbs ilivoq 'be in a state, be such' and isivoq 'become, get into a state' are subject to the same restrictions as (-)ipoq. Thus, taimailivoq, taimaisivoq 'is, becomes like that'. 20

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

Exx.:

koo. III, 9

taimaileriarmat 'since it started being like that' qanoq ilivdlune (he was unable to understand) 'how it was that...'.

2.4.3. The preceding suffixes correspond more or less to the notation P(x), where P stands for the notation expressed by the root (usually a substantive), and

x is the subject of the verbal construction. The 'link' or copula is the suffix for TO BE, -u- or, in some cases, -it-. The following suffix, on the other hand, is of a different character: -qar-, denominal, unrestricted, expresses the fact that there is some x such that P holds for x:(3x)(Px); e.g. igd/oqarpoq 'there is a house' i.e. 'there is an x such that x is a house'. -qar-, however, does not only express TO BE: dictionaries usually give 'to have' as its second meaning. This is to say that there may be another reference; logically: 'there is an x such that P(x) and somebody has x'; e.g. ateqarpunga '1 have the name', 'my name is' (e.g. Paviamik: Pavia; ateq 'name'. Note the instrumental case-ending -mik with this construction). The predication on x may be added from the outside (as in the above example (Paviamik), or by suffixes added to the root itself, or by both. Cp.: R.,116

inoqarpoq 'there are people around' (in uk) peqarpoq 'something is', or 'somebody has some-

GDO koo. III, 137

tugtunik peqarpoq 'there are reindeer around' imaq ... sikoqarpoq 'there is ice in the sea'.

thing'

To emphasize the fact that there is some agent x such that a verbal predication can be made on x, one may add the suffix -toq (usually called an intransitive participial), and in this way connect a verbal notion with -qar-. Ex.:

koo. III, 45

igdlartunguaqarpoq 'somebody surely was having a good time' (igdlarpoq 'laugh').

Thus the denominal suffix -qar- becomes conveniently deverbal. The same goal may also be attained by adding the suffix -neq (usually styled infinitive); this emphasizes the action of the verb rather than the agent. Also, -gaq (passive participle) may be added to the verbal root; but in this case -u- usually takes over. The original difference in meaning is seen in e.g. :

asassauvoq 'is beloved' (asavoq 'love') asaneqarpoq 'is loved' (corresponding to a normal passive). 21

JACOB MEY

For contrast, cf.:

asassoqarpoq 'somebody loves, has love' asassaqarpoq 'somebody is somebody's sweetheart'. Other examples:

A/G 102:22 (1962), 4 ibid.

ibid., 8

taineqartartoq 'so-called' (tai- 'call', lit.: 'one who usually (-tar) is called') mana sananeqartalerput 'these (kinds of bread) have now begun to be regularly produced (sana- 'produce') pineqarsinduput (these products) 'are only carried' (by ... ).

As may be seen from these examples, taken from modern newspaper Greenlandic, the -qar- construction (most often preceded, sometimes followed by -neq) has gained an enormous popularity in the language. While -qar- is not excessively frequent in the older texts, it turns up at least once in almost every sentence of newspaper articles and the like. Also, it is used to coin new expressions, like that for 'ministry':

GDO

ministereqarfik (lit. 'place where there is a minister')

2.4.4. Other Semantically Related Suffixes

-nga- 'be in a state', denominal; ex.: inungavoq 'is like an Eskimo' (inuk). Possibly connected with: -ma- 'be in a state', deverbal; ex.:

qaumavoq 'is bright' (qauvoq) -nar- 'be such that... can be done', deverbal; ex.: qujanarpoq 'is something to thank for' (qujavoq) -gig- 'be good ... ', denominal and deverbal; ex.: koo. III, 33

eq silaginguarame 'oh what a beautiful weather' (sila- 'it is weather' i.e. good weather)

-sig- 'be rather far in the direction of ... ', denominal; ex.: B.47.6

qdqasigpoq 'it is pretty high up the mountain' (qdqaq)

2.4.5. Negative Suffixes

The suffix -it- (not to be confused with -it- sub 2.4.2., which has different 22

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

morphophonemic properties) 11 strictly negates what it is affixed to, thus giving us a way of expressing 'to be without' (sometimes, however, the resulting opposition is contradictory rather than contrary). This suffix is chiefly denominal (also deverbal); restricted. Exx.: (denominal) puissaipoq 'no seal is' i.e. 'there are no seals' (puisse) GDO 333b puilassuitsoq 'where there is no well' i.e. 'desert' ibid., 235b (puilavoq 'it wells') (deverbal) ibid., 333b manipoq 'is uneven' (manig- 'is even') arripoq 'is slow' (arri- 'is in a hurry') Much more widely used is the compound suffix !ngilaq 'is not' (Le. -1)1)itplus a somewhat deviant declensional form). This suffix is deverbal and unrestricted; for it to be used denominally, we have to create a verbal form first; usually, this is done by means of -qar- (see above, 2.4.3.). Exx.:

koo. III, 130

igdlorssuit ... inoqangitsut 'the big houses being without people'

A/G 100:12 (1960), 1

aningaussaliumassoqangilaq (the Eskimo) 'is unwilling to put his money into' (the co-ops).

From what has been said, one would suspect !.ngilaq to be the strict negation of -qar-, i.e. 'there is no x such that P(x)'. Sometimes, however, the negation takes on the value of 'there is an x such that x is not P', leaving to one's own imagination to figure out what x may be instead (usually the contrary of P). (Logically: -(3x) (Px) vs. (3x)-(Px).) Significantly, the current expression for 'good' is by way of negating 'bad':

ajorpog 'is bad' ajungilaq 'is good'.

B. 70

If we negate this again, we get something like: 'is very bad indeed', Gr. ajungingilaq.

2.4.6. This group includes 'verbs of general meaning' (or, if one prefers, 'reduced meaning'), often equivalent to 'be' (also, 'happen', 'become', 'get' (tr.), etc.). They are morphologically independent (i.e. not suffixed to other roots), and they will accept a great number of semantic selections: to use Katz and 11 In order to mark the difference, one could write (with Bergsland 1955) -it- for the negative suffix, -it- for the verb TO BE. As seen from other dialects, we have to do with two originally distinct phonemes that have collapsed in (West) Greenlandic.

23

JACOB MEY

Fodor's formulation (1964, 505), the number of paths from the dictionary entries for each of these lexical items that is compatible with the lower~level syntactic structure of the sentence will be large. (In this respect, then, they are typically different from ~it~ 'be' and its immediate derivatives, the 'semidependent' ilivoq and isivoq.) The main representatives of this group are: pivoq 'be something' (pe); also 'have something; be, arrive somewhere; tr. do something to something' etc. suvoq 'be what' (so). Exx.:

koo. III, 38

seqinerssuaq kanunga pinartoq 'the big sun being right in the West'

GDO 275b

sussoq-una 'what~being this' i.e. 'what's going on?' suvdlune 'being what' i.e. 'why?'.

Note the difference in meaning when pe and so are derivated with

~u~:

piuvoq 'is useful'. (Surprisingly enough, the negated participial piungitsoq 'not useful' also has the GDO 232b ibid.,94b

meaning 'girl' in the older language) suvoq 'is something, is worth while' Gutipiluit silngitdlat 'the false gods are nothing'.

2.4.7. 'Spurious' Representation (This heading is of course unfair, since it implies what I have to prove; but for the time being it will do.) In this group one finds verbs that all may be (but not always necessarily are) translated by some form of 'be'. Cf. Bergsland's remark: "Most of the intransitive, ambivalent [i.e. verbal and nominal, JM] roots seem to indicate 'be, have' or 'become, produce' what is indicated nominally by [i.e. wrt. the denotation of] the root." (B. 97.1) Exx.: ajuvoq 'be bad' (ajo) nartuvoq 'be pregnant' (narto 'foetus') aussavoq 'be summer' (aussaq) (aussarpoq 'become summer') arrivoq 'be in a hurry' (?) tarpoq 'be dark' (taq) sikuvoq 'be iced' (siko) qauvoq 'be daylight' (qauk) etc., etc. 24

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

It is difficult to see how this group can be significant as representing the notion of TO BE (granted that there is such a notion and that we can define it). Is there, e.g., a significant difference in Greenlandic between 'sleep' and 'to be asleep'? In many cases, sinigpoq will express either one of these; in other, derivation and/or flexion will do the job. Cf.:

sinigdlune 'while he was sleeping, was asleep' (sinig'sleep') (contemporative mood), and

B. 74.4 GDO 347a

sineriarpoq (suffix -riar-: "'be -ing', very frequent, and often without appreciable meaning"; "adds zest to the speech"); hence: 'sleeps furiously'.

More on this in the next section.

2.4.8. 'Grammatical' Introduction of TO

BE

These cases are roughly of the equivalent of the so-called auxiliaries (auxiliary verbs) in many languages ('to have, to be'). There is no common way of periphrastic expression in Greenlandic, like there is in many other languages, where tense, diathesis, mood etc. are expressed (at least in many instances) by verb plus one or more auxiliaries. The Greenlandic verb has a complete and (with a few minor exceptions) universal set of suffixes to take care of all this. (Note, in passing, that the verb is essentially tenseneutral: there are no different sets of suffixes for past and present tenses, and future is usually expressed by derivation (exception made for subordinate moods 'causal' and 'conditional', if interpreted as tense-denoting). Pending the discussion on the derivation of these items (the auxiliaries, esp. 'have' and 'be') in the P-marker, I will not include them in my list, but rather refer to a more complete treatment in future work. The auxiliaries should be distinguished from copula-like uses of 'have' and 'be': while the first may be derived from Tense and lor Modal, the second ("linking" 'have' and 'be') "could be formulated quite simply in terms of items linked by Aux in the deep structure with different results according to whether the items are definite or indefinite, generic, locational, predicative and so on" (Bach 1966, 35MS). This naturally leads us to consider the role of nominal sentences in Greenlandic syntax.

2.4.9. Nominal Sentences Admitting that a 'nonverbal' treatment of 'have, be' could be appropriate (at least in the deep structure), the question now arises if the so-called nominal sentences give any evidence in favor of, or against this conception.

25

JACOB MEY

Nominal sentences in Greenlandic are either 1. sentences without an 'inflected' verbal form, or 2. sentences without any verbal form at all, as head of clause. 2.4.9.1.

a. The very frequent participial constructions, ex.:

koo. III, 132

itti qaugdlorigsoq, ilti qernalugtoq 'some of it (the ice block) was light, some of it was dark'

may be thrown in with the preceding group (they are not really 'uninflected', having both the participial suffix and number suffix); in many cases they are more like appositions or even adverbs, and it is not always easy to draw neat boundaries. (Note that the cognate of the participial (intransitive) in -toq serves as indicative in Alaskan Eskimo (Nunamiut dialect; see Bergsland 1957, 13).) b. The verbal 'short forms', type qujanaq 'thanks' (qujanar- 'be worthy of thanks', suffix -nar-, see 2.4.4.). Exx.:

att. I, 11 att. I, 6

atdltirqik 'fine weather' (atdtarqig- 'the sky is clear', suffix -gig-, see 2.4.4.) neqti mamarunaq 'its meat will taste nice' (mamar'taste good', suffix -gunar- 'be sure to').

Many of these forms often have an interjectional character, so that they do not affect the structure of the sentence in any way:

koo. III, 10

'" arpainaq ... (the captain made his men go round) 'running' (arpag-, suffix -inaq 'just') erninaq 'at once' (erner- 'do at once').

Others are completely nominal (or rather, can be taken nominally because of suffix ambivalency) and belong to the next subgroup. 2.4.9.2. Strictly nominal sentences have no verb; they contain usually a pronoun (demonstrative or personal), an adverb (place or time) or even an interjection as 'head'. Exx.:

koo. III, 8 att. II, 12

26

uvanga aitstit tassa 'I first here' i.e. 'here I am, at last' uvtilo (=uvangalo) sukumik 'and I with sugar' i.e. 'what about a piece of sugar for me'

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

kisalo qilugtussatdliuko 'and at last they (disap-

att. II, 86

peared in the skies and became) the Pleiades' sunauvfagoq qivftuligssuaq 'what! they said, a big place full of qivftoq's' i.e. 'imagine us coming right up to this qivftoq-ridden place' (q. = a 'mountainman', i.e. a person who has found his death in the mountains (usually voluntarily) and thus acquires supernatural powers).

att. I, 13

3.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

3.1. The Method Applied to Greenlandic Since similarity was assumed to be basic in finding any (prospective) universals, the quest had to start from something that was known to be similar to something else. The material consisted mainly of Greenlandic texts (both older, and, presumably, more authentic ones, and newer texts, more tailored to modern needs, and thus more susceptible to borrowing and other extraneous influences) as well as of dictionaries. (A complete list of the sources is given above, Section 2.2.). In some cases, like those where 'newspaper Greenlandie' is concerned, one is provided with an authoritative translation of the Greenlandie texts; this comes in very useful since 'trade union Greenlandie', as it was jokingly styled by one expert, defeats the older saga texts by a broad margin as far as difficulties of understandings go. (For the older texts, free translations by the famous Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen are available, see Rasmussen 1921-5). Owing to lack of informants, only occasional checking of dubious points could be carried out 12; nevertheless, the author thinks that the facts as presented here are sufficiently faithfully reproduced from the Greenlandic sources, and cross-checked with the authorities on Greenlandie to warrant the conclusions arrived at, as far as the material is concerned. In practice, the method was carried out in four steps: 1. Scanning of the material, noting down Greenlandic expressions for TO BE. The reverse method, namely looking for equivalents of Danish entries in Danish-Greenlandic dictionaries, or making up examples on the basis of a 12 The author wants to acknowledge valuable help received from Mrs. Grete Josefsen, a native speaker and teacher from Nilk (Godthaab). Mr. P.E. Balle, librarian, The Royal Library, Copenhagen, graciously provided the newspaper material. - Professor Knut Bergsland, Oslo University, has been a continuous source of information, inspiration and other help throughout the work.

27

JACOB MEY

given Danish expression for TO BE, was only used sporadically as a control device. As is well known to field workers, the latter method poses its own (rather formidable) problems of correctly formulating one's questions; in many cases it precludes, rather than promotes, a solution to the problem. 2. Grouping of the Greenlandic expressions (culled with what was thought to be a suitable context) into morphologically homogeneous groups on the basis of some given form (for verbs, usually the third person singular of the indicative mood; for nouns, the absolutive case singular). 3. The material thus grouped consisted of Greenlandic expressions with a certain degree of similarity (interlingual: Greenlandic-Danish and, in many cases, Greenlandic-English as well) plus groupwise morphological (intralingual) homogeneity. The next step was to examine degrees of similarity in accordance with the criteria outlined above; in doing this, we found groups of equivalents in some other language (Danish, occasionally English), together with the contextual restrictions that apply in each (group of) case(s). 4. Next, we looked for significant groupings in the other language in order to find equivalents that behave like their corresponding Greenlandic expressions with regard to contextual restrictions. The more of these we can find, the more similar the underlying notion will be in the two languages; however, the fewer restrictions we have to impose on either of them, the more truly universal the notion will be. As said before, universals in this sense can only be defined with respect to particular languages; whatever our findings are worth, they will still only hold for the language(s) that we have examined. The advantage of comparing very dissimilar languages like Greenlandic and Danish (or English) is that many extralinguistic 'universalizing' factors that operate in e.g. the American and European communities have not yet been able to gain sufficient momentum to produce significant linguistic effects in Greenlandic (although the process of acculturation has picked up considerable speed during the last decade or so there, too).

3.2. The Findings The fact that there is no special verb expressing TO BE in Greenlandic 13 need neither alarm nor amaze us. Actually, as has been remarked by Bach (1966), English (together with a number of other, mostly Indo-European languages) behaves almost pathologically in this respect, possessing separate verbs (or 13 I realize that this statement is unprecise and needs to be refined (like all statements beginning with 'There is ... ' and 'There is not.. .'). Adding a specific context (' ... such that .. .'), we could make the above more precise, in the sense of: 'There is no copula-verb in Greenlandic', which is a correct statement, if 'verb' is taken in the traditional sense. For the so-called 'verbum substantivum', see below.

28

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

'pseudoverbs') for both TO BE and TO HAVE. Already in 1957, Chomsky assumed that "the apparently irregular behavior of certain words (e.g. 'have', 'be', 'seem') is really a case of higher level regularity (107). If this is so, then irregular behavior (from an English point of view) of the expressions for TO BE in Greenlandic may well turn out to be more, or at least not less, normal than that verb's (or whatever it may be called) behavior in other, more wellknown languages. TO BE, then, is predominantly, though not exclusively, a suffixal affair in Greenlandic. The non-suffixal representations (as seen from the material presented in Section 2) are subject to heavy restrictions that appear to operate intralingually only. It seems therefore that, at least in this relatively restricted context (where only surface structure is considered), there is no reason to set up a specific universal notion for these cases: rather, it seems reasonable to include them as contextually determined variants of TO BE in Greenlandic only (the conditions being totally at variance for Greenlandic and (presumably) most other languages like Danish, English etc.) It is interesting to note that the non-suffixed forms of the verb it- are used whenever the need arises to express TO BE in its philosophical connotation of 'to exist' (as a substance, rather than as an accidental property). The 'verbum substantivum', as it is often called, seems to occur in rather specialized contexts only: as an example, cf. the following quotation from the Gospel: Aaperat pfngungfkatdlarmat uvanga fpunga 'before Abraham was made, I am' (John 8: 58). K. Bergsland, to whom lowe this example, notes that in Aleut this distinction between the normal representation for TO BE (suffix -a- (corresponding to Greenlandic -u-) and the 'theological verb of existence' does not hold. If one accepts this Bible translation as authentic Greenlandic linguistic evidence, then there is a 'verbum substantivum' in Greenlandic, corresponding rather neatly to the requirements of the original (of course not authentically Greenlandic) theological context.1 4 As an extra benefit one may note that Greenlandic expresses the original idea even better than does e.g. the Russian translation of this passage, from which the Aleut rendering stems: ' .. .ja by/' (Bergsland 1967, 18MS). What, in the Vulgata version, is a violation of the consecutio temporum: priusquam Abraham Jactus esset, Ego sum, becomes natural in a language that does not express tense in primary moods (fpunga can mean 'I am'. 'I was' etc). Thus, theological precision is achieved on the background of what some would call morphological vagueness. Taking a look at the suffixal representations of TO BE in Greenlandic, we 14 Strictly speaking, one cannot exclude this kind of texts by any other criterion than assumed lack of knowledge of the language on the part of the Bible translators. And, in many cases, this is not only unfair, but also a grave sin against history: Bible translations were (and are) among the first literary productions in many languages (including our own),

29

JACOB MEY

first note the difference between -u- and -qar-, meaning respectively: 'to be a ... ' and 'there is a ... ' (for a more precise formulation, see the discussion above, 2.4.3.). These notions seem to correspond to the morphological context they require: both -u- and -qar- are denominal. Furthermore, they are both virtually unrestricted as far as contextual features go (see discussion above, section 1.3.). In a way they correspond rather nicely to English to be: if -u- and -qar- can be said to be 'context-free' suffixes, then be is a 'contextfree' verb, or very nearly so. However, going from English or Danish to Greenlandic, we discover that -u- and -qar- are not the only equivalents of to be. As seen in what I have called the 'spurious' representations of TO BE, in many cases English be just disappears under translation; there is no rule for this, apart from the general statement that, although surface structure may be different in cases like it is bad and 'it bads' (Greenlandic ajuvoq, see 2.4.7.), we still may have similarity in the deep structures. One way or another, contextual conditions seem to be hard to find; in other words, there is no interlingual groupwise similarity in these cases. As to the syntactic implications, the most one can say is probably that the rules for similarity of TO BE representations seem to be more difficult to formulate at this low level of syntactic complexity (considering only a verbal form plus its immediate complement). There seems to be a need for a more general (higherlevel) rule in the syntax that puts in an abstract symbol for TO BE without having to specify its morphological or lexical shape (see below, Section 3.3.). As to the verbs with 'general meaning' (for lack of a better label), these seem to be typically unilingual phenomena. While many languages have a semantically neutral verb meaning 'to do something, to be something', the typical properties of Greenlandic pi- (see 2.4.6.) seem to be intimately connected with the fact that it can appear in an extremely variegated suffixal environment; as a good example, cf. the above quotation from John's Gospel, where the theological concept of 'being created' is expressed by pi- plus the suffixes -yyur- (cf. 2.4.1.: 'become'): 'become something'; -yyit- (cf. 2.4.5.: 'no1'): 'not become something'; -kallar- ('somewhat; still'): 'not yet become something', plus the normal third person singular suffix for the causal (relative preterite) mood, thus giving, as a logical and theologically unimpeachable rendering: 'when Abraham had not yet become something', i.e. 'before Abraham was created'. This example illustrates a possible way of translating TO BE into Greenlandic, but it is hardly feasible to generalize, on the basis of this and similar examples, to the existence of interlingual similarity (granted that we have theological consensus about the problems of creation and existence). In any case, note that this 'primitive' language in fact tells us a good deal more than many of the so-called 'civilized' ones in its rendering of this specimen of the Divine's knotty prose. Maybe it does 30

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

so in virtue of its alleged primitivity (whatever that is) rather than despite this quality; for a non-native speaker it is well-nigh impossible to determine to what degree a derivation by means of suffixation like the one above constitutes a replica of some mental process (granted that it does so at all). It may very well be that in many cases the 'mental' derivation just is not there (any more, some would add); it seems plausible that at least some of the more complicated suffix structures of Greenlandic are taken in big strides rather than in the meticulous step-by-step procedures of the analyst or the foreign learner. The inclusion in the list of section 2.4. of the suffix -1)1)it-, the negative suffix, is due to more than a mere poetical association of thoughts; indeed, 'not to be' in Greenlandic is more than just the negation of 'to be', as I have shown above (2.4.5.): one, the suffix may get incorporated with its base (the root) and constitute a unit, where the negative quality is less transparent than the morphemic structure would let us believe; two, the negation may be effected in different ways, creating quite an interesting dilemma for the logician in many a case. However, within the limits of the method used, there seems to be no compelling reason to treat 'not to be' as different from any other negated roots; that is to say, there is no reason to look for any universal 'not to be' (quite another question, and one I shall not discuss here, is where, and how, we should include a representation of the negation in our syntactic structure).

3.3. Syntactic Implications and Some Further Perspectives Two cases remain to be discussed: the so-called grammatical introduction of TO BE (2.4.8.) and the different kinds of nominal sentences (2.4.9.). Apart from what already has been said above, the following observation seems to be in order. The 'grammatical introduction' of an item has essentially to do with the way this item is represented in some higher structural level. Thus, the question of TO BE in environments like the so-called composite tenses in various languages cannot possibly be discussed in any fruitful way on the surface structure level: how to distinguish, in English, between he is born and he is dead, limiting ourselves to the surface structures of these phrases? By contrast, the distinction between avoir and etre in French seems to operate wholly on some low level of syntactic complexity: cf. je suis venu, j'ai donne; j'ai lave la vaisselle, je me suis lave les mains. As long as a syntax of Greenlandic (or at least, an attempt at some description, partial or total, in modern terms) is not available, this kind of discussion makes little sense for a language that (for all I know) is very much

31

JACOB MEY

unlike anything that so far has been described in a modern (e.g. generative) framework. The author of this study hopes to remedy this defect (at least to a certain extent) in the near future; let me just indicate one of the fields that seem to merit close attention in this connection: the question how to describe the Greenlandic system of verbal categories. It is usually stated that there are no tenses in Greenlandic, only moods; yet, in subordinate clauses, the moods can be used to express what in other languages is rendered by tense morphemes. In whatever way we choose to describe tense, it seems wise to keep the occurrence of forms of to be in English, etre in French, etc. apart from the representation of the category Tense as such (viz., in some deep structure); for Greenlandic, this will imply that the whole problem just vanishes: there is nothing to include, nothing to describe. Can we use the same argumentation in the case of the so-called nominal sentences? I think we can, for the following reasons: first, some of the 'nominal sentences' are in fact only apparently so (2.4.9.l.a.): there is an extensive interplay between participial and indicative, and many participial (intransitive) verbal forms should be treated as verbal heads of clauses rather than as nominal forms in search of a verbal head. The short verbal forms (ibid., b) seem to behave somewhat differently, i.e. more like independent nouns or interjections. Second: the real nominal sentences obey certain rules with regard to their possible heads (see 2.4.9.2.), which make them appear as an independent alternative to a normal verbal sentence (phrase). If this is a correct, or at least a possible interpretation of these cases, we can derive Greenlandic sentences in a double way: either verbal or non-verbal (subject to certain conditions). Since it is not at all certain or even probable that we here have to do with a truly interlingual grouping, these cases are better not taken into account when establishing equivalents of TO BE in Greenlandic. To conclude, I want to bring up the question of a universal representation of TO BE. If we consider the operation of translation as a mapping, creating a homomorphism between (structures of) two languages, then the inverse operation ('retranslation', to make up a word) would be, under idealized conditions, again a homomorphism. The process would not, ideally, have to be carried out in a word-to-word environment; rather, one would have to place heavy weight on contextual conditions, as every skilled translator knows. The whole operation would then be an isomorphism (a bijective homomorphism), and the problems of linguistic universals and their representations could be solved entirely inside a syntactic framework with different semantic interpretations for various languages. Translation in such cases (actually all MT-workers' dream) would be like what Saumjan has called (1965, 65) "translation in the syntactic sense" (e.g. the interpretation of

32

ON THE NOTION 'TO BE' IN ESKIMO

Lobacevskij's geometry in a Euclidic system or vice versa).l5 To develop a similar concept for natural languages, one would have to define (or rather, redefine) an already existing language in this sense (as computer languages redefine a small part of a natural language like English, basing themselves on language-independent logical operations and concepts), or else create a totally new language that would be truly universal (being defined in a maximally language-independent way, but at the same time interpretable in a maximally great number of natural languages). A concept like the one sketched here has been, and is being further developed in connection with problems in data retrieval, machine translation, automatic classification and the like (under names like Interlingua, intermediate language,jazyk posrednyj etc.). While research in this field is still in its beginning, it shows that our present question: how to represent TO BE in Greenlandic, far from being remote from the facts of language, purely theoretical, or even totally vacuous, well may lead to new insights in the nature of numerous linguistic problems.

University of Oslo University of Texas BIBLlOGRAPHy16 Bach, E. (1967), 'To Have and To Be', Lg. 43 (1967), 462-86. - (1967), 'Nouns and Nounphrases', paper read at the 1967 Symposium on Universals, Austin, Texas, April 13-16, 1967. Bar-Hillel, Y. (1964), Language and Information, Reading, Mass. and Jerusalem. Bergsland, K. (1955) (= B.), A Grammatical Outline of the Eskimo Language of West Greenland (mimeogr.,), Oslo. - (1957), Niiytteitii Aleutti- ja Eskimokielistii (mimeogr.), Helsinki. - (1959), 'Aleut Dialects of Atka and Attu', Proc. Amer. Phi/os. Soc. [N. S.]49, 3. - (1962), 'Morphological Analysis and Syntactical Reconstruction in Eskimo-Aleut', Proc. 9th Int. Congr. of Linguistics, Cambridge, Mass., 1009 ff. - (1967), 'A Problem of Transformation and the Question of Linguistic Universals', to appear in Melanges Martinet. Bloomfield, L. (1933), Language, New York, N.Y. and London. Chomsky, N. (1957), Syntactic Structures, The Hague. - (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, Mass. Dansk-Griinlandsk Ordbog [Danish-Greenlandic Dictionary] (1960) (= DGO), Copenhagen. Fischer-Jorgensen, Eli (1966), 'Form and Substance in Glossematics', Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 10 (1966), 1-33. Den griinlandske Ordbog [Greenlandic-Danish Dictionary] (1926) (=GDO), Copenhagen (also Greenlandic-English, Copenhagen 1927). Greenberg, J. (Ed.) (1963), Universals of Language, Cambridge, Mass.

15 The example is originally borrowed from Poincare, who, as a thought-experiment, compares this kind of translation to finding the equivalent of a German text in French with the exclusive aid of a German-French dictionary. 16 See also Section 2.2.

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Hammerich, L. (1936), Personalendungen und Verbalsystem in Eskimoischen, Copenhagen. Harris, Z. (1962), String Analysis 0/ Sentence Structure, The Hague. Hjelmslev, L. (1938), 'Essai d'une theorie des morphemes', in Hjelmslev (1959),152-64. - (1943), Omkring Sprogteoriens Grundltl!ggelse, Copenhagen. - (1953), Prolegomena to a Theory 0/ Language (English translation of Hjelmslev (1943) by F. Whitfield), Baltimore. - (1959), Essais linguistiques, Copenhagen. Katz, J. and Fodor, J. (1963), 'The Structure of a Semantic Theory', Lg. 39 (163),170-210. Katz, J. and Postal, P. (1964), An Integrated Theory 0/ Lingated Descriptions, Cambridge, Mass. Mey, J. (1968), Review of P. Sgall (ed.), Prague Studies in Mathematical Linguistics, I IJAL 34 (1968), 62-74. Montgomery, C. (1965), Review of E. Bach, An Introduction to Trans/ormational Grammars, Lg. 41 (1965), 632-40. Moulton, W. (1947), 'Juncture in Modern Standard German', Lg. 23 (1947), 212-26 (reprinted in RiL I). Novak, P. (1966), 'On Mathematical Models of Linguistic Objects', Prague Studies in Mathematical Linguistics, I, Prague and University, Ala., p. 155-7. Rasmussen, C. (1888), Granlandsk Sprogltl!re, Copenhagen. Rasmussen, K. (1921-5), Myter og Sagn/ra Granland, I-III, Copenhagen. Sparck-Jones, K. (= K. S. Needham) (1964), Synonymy and Semantic Classification, Cambridge (England). Saumjan, S. (1965), Strukturnaja lingvistika, Moscow. Weinreich, U. (1963), 'On the Semantic Structure of Language', in Greenberg (1963), 114-71. - (1966), 'Explorations in Semantic Theory, in Sebeok, Th. (Ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, III, The Hague, 395-477.

34

YAMUNA KACHRU

THE COPULA IN HINDI*

I. INTRODUCTION

1.0. In this paper Hindi refers to the standard form of the language, i.e., the form which is used by educated Hindi speakers in what is usually termed the Madhya Desa of India'! 1.1. The aim of this paper is to describe the syntax of the copula verb in Hindi. In Section II, I will discuss some essentials of Hindi syntax to provide the relevant background for a discussion of the main topic. A systematic semantic structure of Hindi is yet to be worked out; therefore, no attempt will be made to give detailed semantic interpretations of the constructions involving the copula. A few tentative remarks on the semantics of the copula will, however, be incorporated to explain the syntactic points wherever necessary. I have already presented an outline of Hindi verbal syntax elsewhere. 2 1.2. I have followed the transformational-generative model of the grammar proposed by Noam Chomsky in his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (M.I.T. Press, 1965). • This work was supported in part by a research grant from the Central Research Fund, University of London. I am indebted to Professor Robert B. Lees for his comments on an earlier version of this paper. 1 Hindi is one of the most important of the modern Indo-Aryan languages of India, and is spoken by more than one hundred and twenty three million people (123025489) as a first language; see 'Introductory Note', Census of India, 1961, Vol. I, Part II-c(ii), New Delhi, 1964 p. ccxiv. There are also a large number of Indians in India and outside India who speak it as a second language. The Hindi area extends from East Punjab in the West to the borders of West Bengal in the East, and from Himachal Pradesh in the North to Madhya Pradesh in the South. Although there are regional variations even in the standard form of the language in this vast geographical area, a standard variety distinct from the numerous dialects spoken in various regions is clearly recognizable. 2 Kachru, Yamuna: (a) A Transformational Treatment of Hindi Verbal Syntax, Ph.D. Dissertation, London University, 1965 (unpublished); (b) 'Some Rules for Passive and Causative Sentences in Hindi', paper presented at the Linguistic Society of America meeting at Chicago, December 27, 1965; (c) 'Nominal and Verbal Complement Constructions in Hindi', paper presented at the second regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, April 2, 1966; and (d) 'On Possessives in Hindi' paper presented at the American Oriental Society meeting in Philadelphia, April 20, 1966.

35 J. W. M. Verhaar (ed.), The Verb' Be' and its Synonyms 2, 35-59. All rights reserved.

YAMUNA KACHRU

1.3. The Romanization for the Devanagari script used here is roughly the same as that used in my earlier work; it is a transliteration of the Devanagari script. 3 The Hindi forms will be followed mostly by free translation. I will also give word-bound or 'literal translations' wherever they seem to be required for clarity.

II. SOME PRELIMINARIES OF HINDI SYNTAX

A. Simple Sentences in Hindi 2.0. The following constituent structure rules (hereafter abbreviated CS rules) generate the underlying forms of all simple declarative indicative sentences in Hindi. Each rule is followed by the necessary explanations and examples. (i)

S~ NP

Pred-P

The first rule expands the initial symbol S(entence) into N(oun) P(hrase) and Pred(icate) P(hrase).

(ii)

Pred-P~(time)

(place) (Neg) VP Aux

As the Pred-P includes some nominal constructions in its expansion, the symbol Pred-P is developed first. It is expanded into optional adverbials of time and place, a Neg(ative element), and obligatory constituents of V(erb) P(hrase) and Aux(iliary) (iii)

l

Predicate + ho VP--+ {(PPh:aSe) (PPhrase) (NP ko) (NP) (Manner)} V (Opr) PredIcate

1

The VP is expanded to provide three basic choices: a) Predicate Complement + linking verb ho 'be' b) Intransitive and Transitive verbs c) Predicate Complement + verbs that require such a complement. As 3 In the transcription used in this paper, no distinction has been made between sequences of two consonants that are represented by a conjunct consonant symbol in Devaniigari, and the sequences of two consonants that result because of the deletion of the inherent neutral vowel iJ in certain positions. Thus, the transcription makes no distinction between raIn (where I and n are combined) and itna (where the neutral vowel iJ inherent in t, though preserved in the Devaniigari writing system, has been lost in pronunciation). Notice also the use of c,j, and y for IPA If, d3, and j respectively. ri is used for the old Indo-Aryan syllable r;!, th, rI. rlh, (I,~, rand rh are used for the retroflex stops, nasal, sibilant and flaps.

36

THE COPULA IN HINDI

the frame of VP is relevant for the sub-categorization of V 4, the above rule specifies the following main classes of Hindi verbs: 1) The linking or copula verb ho 'be' 2) Intransitive verbs 3) Transitive verbs 4) Double object verbs 5) Verbs that take a predicate complement; and

6) compound verbs, i.e., complexes of {~}operator (abb. Opr) type. 5 The last five are further sub-categorized on the basis of co-occurrence restrictions between the V and the P(ostpositional) Phrase(s) and Manner adverbials. 6 (iv)

Predicate~ I~: PPhrase

I

The constituent predicate is expanded into NP, or A(djectival) P(hrase), or PPhrase. (v)

PPhrase~NP

PP

The PPhrase is expanded into NP and P(ost)P(osition). Note that the N of the NP and also the PP will have to be marked for features of location, purpose, etc., to get the correct adverbial phrases in the output. The following sentences exemplify the various sub-categories of Hindi verbs mentioned above:

+ ho: 1. lsvar dayalu he

(i) Predicate

'God is kind'. See Chomsky: Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Section 2.3.4, pp. 90-106. The term Operator was first used by John Burton-Page in his article entitled 'Compound and Conjunct Verbs in Hindi', published in BSOAS XIX, 1957 to refer to the second element of a V + V combination. Others such as Paul Hacker, have referred to the same element as auxiliary verb (cf. Hacker's 'On the Problem of a Method for Treating the Compound and Conjunct Verbs in Hindi', BSOAS XXIV, 1961). As I have used Auxiliary Verb to refer to the carrier of Tense and the number-gender-person marker element hona, the second element of a compound verb has been referred to as an Operator throughout this study. See Section 5.11 of this study for an explanation of what is meant by compound and conjunct verbs. 6 It is obvious that lumping all adverbial expressions together as post-positional phrase is not satisfactory as there are important selectional restrictions between Adverbials and Verbs. In a more complete grammar of Hindi, this rule will have to be revised to generate correct sequences of adverbials and V. For our purpose, however, such revision is not strictly required. 4

5

37

YAMUNA KACHRU

2. ram darsnik he 'Ram is a philosopher'. 3. ram ghar me he 'Ram is at home'. (ii) Intransitive Verb 4. bacce so rahe he children sleep-ing are 'The children are sleeping'. 5. bag me phiil khile he garden in flowers bloom are 'In the garden the flowers have bloomed'. (iii) Transitive Verb 6. ram ne kai lekh likhe Ram many articles wrote 'Ram wrote many articles'. 7. me ne ram ke sath cay pi 1 Ram with tea drank 'I drank some tea with Ram'. 8. vah tumhare liye kapre laya He you for clothes brought 'He brought some clothes for you'. (iv) Double Object Verb 9. me ne aj mii ko patr likha 1 today mother to letter wrote 'I wrote a letter to mother today'. 10. usne bacco ko kuch khil:me bheje He children to some toys sent 'He sent some toys to the children'.

(v) Predicate Complement Verbs 11. larka samajhdar nikla Boy intelligent proved 'The boy proved (to be) intelligent'. 12. vah saray me thahra He inn in stayed 'He stayed in an inn'.

38

THE COPULA IN HINDI

(vi) Compound Verbs

13. bacce so gaye children sleep went 'The children went to sleep'. 14. me ne cay pi If he I tea drunk have 'I have already had some tea'. 15. vah aksar lekh likhta rahta he He frequently articles writing keeps 'He keeps writing articles frequently'. 16. me roz vahiijaya karta tha I every day there used to go 'I used to go there every day'.

B. The Auxiliary Element

3.0. I shall first discuss the Auxiliary element in Hindi in some detail and then give the rules that expand the Auxiliary element generated by CS rule (ii). (See 2.0.) The following three aspects and three tenses may be set up for Hindi verbs:

I. Aspect (i) Imperfective (ii) Perfective (iii) Durative II. Tenses (i) Present (ii) Past (iii) Future The future is formed by suffixing the future-marker -ga to the optative form of the verb, e.g., the verb sona 'to sleep' has the following forms: 'may (he) sleep' Optative: soe Future: soega '(He) wiII sleep'. The other tenses are formed by combining the aspect and tense forms in the following manner: (i) Imperfectives

sota he sota tha sota ho

'sleeps' 'used to sleep, slept' 'may be sleeping' 39

YAMUNA KACHRU

sota hoga sota hota

'must be sleeping' 'had (he) been sleeping'

(ii) Perfectives

soya soya he soya tha soya ho soya hoga soya hota

'slept' 'has slept, is asleep' 'had slept, was asleep' 'may have slept' 'must have slept' 'had (he) slept'

(iii) Duratives

so so so so so

raha he raha tha raha ho raha hoga raha hota

'is sleeping' 'was sleeping' 'may be sleeping' 'must be sleeping' 'had (he) been sleeping'.

The imperative forms are formed by suffixing the second person markers to the root of the verb, e.g., 2nd person (sing.) so 'sleep' 'sleep' 2nd person (pI.) soo 2nd person (hon.) soiye 'please sleep'. The aspect-tense markers can be preceded by modals sak 'to be able to' and cuk (completive), which in turn could be preceded by the so-called passive marker ya+ja, e.g.,

so sakta he 'is able to sleep' so cuka he 'has already slept' khayajata he 'is eaten'. Note that nothing has been said here about the category of Mood, as moods such as imperative etc. are not mere expansions of the element Aux. The rules given below (in 3.1) generate all the strings that are required.

3.1. The above information can be summed up in the following rules 7 :

I

(vi)

e (ga) T Aux-..+(yaja) (modal) {A

(vii)

Aspect

-..+

I~:raha

spect ense

}

7 The rules, as stated here, are not quite satisfactory, but their shortcomings will not affect the present discussion.

40

THE COPULA IN HINDI

(viii)

Tense

~

present past ho contingent past contingent presumptive

The agreement features of number, gender, and person are introduced by transformational rules, and thus need not be considered here. The copula, or linking verb, ho, in addition to all the above forms, has two more forms, i.e., he 'is', and tha 'was'.s 3.2. We need other rules to specify that if under the MY the linking verb ho is chosen, then in some environments the ho constituent of the tense is obligatorily deleted. There are other restraints on the co-occurrence of the operator element and the elements of the Auxiliary which are not relevant for our present purposes. C. Agreement Rules 4.0. A brief discussion on the agreement rules will conclude this section on the preliminaries of Hindi syntax. This should provide us with the basic information for a discussion of the syntax of the copula verb ho 'be'. 4.1. In the existing grammars, as well as in more recent works on Hindi, there are detailed discussions of the ergative construction in Hindi. 9 As this construction is related significantly to the agreement rules, it would be relevant to explain what is meant by the ergative construction. 8 Historically, the roots of the forms he, tha, and hona are quite distinct from each other. The form hona is related to Sanskrit root bhU, whereas he is related to the root as and tha to the root sthii. Synchronically, however, it is convenient to treat he and tha as related to hona. 9 The ergative construction is referred to as 'objectival construction' in most grammars. See Kellogg, S.H., A Grammar of the Hindi Language, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London (1875), section 412, pp. 238--40, (1955 edition); Greaves, E., Hindi Grammar, Indian Press Ltd., Allahabad (1919), sections 213 and 214, pp. 239-40 (1933 edition); Guru, Kamta Prasad, Hindi Vyakara/J (in Hindi, 1920), sections 349-68, pp. 255-70; (1962 edition); Vajpeyi, Kishori Das, Hindi Shabdiinushiisan (in Hindi), Kashi Nagari Pracharini Sabha, Banaras, 1957; section on viicy-vivecan, pp. 408ff; Sharma, Aryendra, A Basic Grammar of Modern Hindi, Ministry of Education and Scientific Research, Government oflndia, 1958, Sections 177-78, pp. 59-60; Allen, W.S., 'A Study in the Analysis of Hindi Sentence Structure' Acta Linguistica VI, 1950-1; Verma, S. K., A Study in Systemic Description of Hindi Grammar and Comparison of the English and Hindi Verbal Group, Edinburgh University, Ph.D. Dissertation, 1964 (unpublished); Kachru, Yamuna, A Transformational Treatment of Hindi Verbal Syntax, London University, Ph.D. Dissertation, 1965 (unpublished).

41

YAMUNA KACHRU

4.2. A comparison of the following sentences with intransitive and transitive verbs in imperfective and perfective aspects is revealing:

Imperfective Intransitive 17. larka sota he 'The boy sleeps'. 18. larki soti he 'The girl sleeps'.

21. larka cay pita he 'The boy drinks tea'. 22. larki cay piti he 'The girl drinks tea'.

Perfective 19. larka soya 'The boy slept'. 20. larki soi 'The girl slept'.

23. larke ne cay pi 'The boy drank tea'. 24. larki ne cay pi 'The girl drank tea'.

Transitive

4.3. It is clear that in the imperfective the syntax of the transitive verb is identical with that of the intransitive except for the presence of the object cay 'tea'. In the perfective, however, a difference in construction is evident. The difference between the imperfective and perfective of transitive sentences may be summarized as follows: In the imperfective (sentences 21 and 22): (i) the subject N is in the direct case, (ii) the object N is in the direct case; and (iii) the verb agrees with the subject N.

In the perfective (sentences 23 and 24): (i) the subject N is in the oblique case and is followed by the postposition ne, (ii) the object N is in the direct case; and (iii) the verb agrees with the object N. 4.4. The following sentences exhibit yet another feature. Compare the transitive perfective sentences 25 and 26 with 27 and 28 respectively:

25. larke ne kitab parhi 'the boy read a book'. 26. larki ne axbar parha 'The girl read a newspaper'.

27. larke ne kitab ko parha 'The boy read the book'. 28. larki ne axbar ko parha 'The girl read the newspaper'.

Notice that the object N's in 27 and 28, kitab 'book' and axbar 'newspaper' respectively, are in the oblique case and are followed by the post-position 42

THE COPULA IN HINDI

ko; hence the verb does not agree in number and gender either with the subject N's larka 'boy' larki 'girl' or with the object N's. In these examples the verb remains in its unmarked form which is traditionally called the masculine singular form. 4.5. A few intransitive verbs also participate in the ergative construction, e.g.,

29. larke ne nahaya 30. larki ne nahaya

'The boy bathed'. 'The girl bathed'.

In these sentences, too, as the subject N is in the oblique case and is followed by the post-position ne, the verb does not agree with the subject noun; instead, it remains in the unmarked form in terms of features of agreement. 4.6. In the double object verb sentences, the direct object N almost always is in the direct case.1 0 Hence the verb agrees with it in the perfective, e.g., kitab 'book' (feminine) in 31, and kapre 'clothes' (masculine plural) in 32:

31. ram ne mohan ko kitab bheji 'Ram sent a book to Mohan'. 32. larki ne bahan ko kapre pahnaye 'The girl dressed her sister'. 4.7. To summarize, then, there are two types of verbs in Hindi: the [-ne] verbs and the [+ne] verbs. Most intransitive verbs are [-ne] and most transitive verbs are [+ ne], but the feature of transitivity and [± ne] do not coincide. As the agreement rules that apply to the imperfective forms also apply to other non-perfective forms, such as the future, there are the following possibilities: (i) [-ne] intransitive and transitive verbs agree in number, gender and person with the subject N of the sentence; (ii) [+ne] transitive verbs agree with the subject N in number, gender and person in the non-perfective; 10 There are some exceptions to this, although Aryendra Sharma states positively that this is the case (cf. his A Basic Grammar of Modern Hindi, Section 203, p. 67 and Section 214, p. 70). One example of such an exception is:

ma ne bacce ko dhai ko thama diya 'Mother gave the baby to the wet nurse to hold. '

Note that when the direct object N is not in the direct case (e.g. bacce ko in the above example), the order of the indirect and direct object in the sentence changes, i.e., the direct object precedes the indirect object (e.g., bacce ko precedes dhai ko in the above example).

43

YAMUNA KACHRU

(iii) [+ne] transitive verbs agree with the direct object N in number and gender in the perfective if it is in the direct case; (iv) [+ne] transitive verbs remain in the unmarked form in the perfective if the direct object N is also in the oblique case and is followed by ko; (v) [+ne] intransitive verbs remain in the unmarked form in the perfective. All double object verbs are [+ne] transitive verbs, and the copula verb ho 'be' is a [-ne] intransitive verb from the point of view of the agreement rules. III. THE SYNTAX OF THE COPULA

5.0. In section II, CS rule (iii) separates the copula verb hona from all other verbs. The reason for this is not only that it has a few extra forms. The syntax of the copula is very different from that of other verbs in many respects. Some of the ways in which the peculiarities of hona are exhibited will be discussed in this section. 5.1. In rule (iii), the constituent Predicate has been set up as an obligatory constituent preceding the verb ho. This is because the verb ho is used as a complement-less verb in only very special contexts, asserting the existence of some being or thing; the following philosophical sentence is an example of this:

33. isvar he

'God exists' or 'God is'.

5.2. In ordinary copulative sentences, the verb ho functions as the linking verb, e.g.,

34. sri$!i nasvar he

'Creation is destructible'.

It is interesting to note that in some modern Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages comparable sentences - the so-called 'equational sentences' contain no verbal element whatsoever. For example, consider the following Bengali sentences:

(a) sristi nJSVJr (b) ram amar bhai

'creation (is) destructible'. 'Ram (is) my brother'.

Or, the following Telugu sentences 11:

(c) ramu¢u ma1Jci-wa¢u Ram good-3rd person suffix 'Ram is good'. 11

I am grateful to K. V. Subbarao for the Telugu examples.

44

THE COPULA IN HINDI

(d) na anna-garu (laktaru My brother-honorific suffix doctor 'My brother is a doctor'. This, however, is true only of the present tense. The linking verb appears in other tenses, such as past and future. For instance, consider the following Bengali and Telugu sentences: Bengali: (e) ram bhalo chilo Ram well was 'Ram was well'. Telugu:

(f) na anna-garu (laktar-awu!a(lu My brother-honorific suffix doctor will become 'My brother will become a doctor'. Hence, even in these languages, the 'equational' sentences will have to be derived from copula sentences by deletion in the present tense. The imperfective hona is used mainly for statements that convey universal truths, e.g.,

35. gay ke ek pilch hoti he 'The cow has a tail'.

36. ek (lalar me s;) sen! hote Ire 'There are one hundred cents in a dollar'.

37. himir ki larkiyii sundar hoti Ire 'The girls of Kashmir are beautiful'. All forms of hona and the compound verb ho jana 12 are used in the sense of becoming, e.g.,

38. ek mahine bad ram (Jccha hua One month after Ram well became 'Ram became well after a month'.

39. per hare ho rahe Ire 'The trees are becoming green'.

40. jare me dhUp bhi sukhkari hoti he Winter in the sun even source of pleasure becomes 'Even the heat of the sun becomes a source of pleasure in winter'. All tense forms of hona, except the simple present he 'is' and simple past tha 'was' are used in the sense of happening. 12 jana as an operator intensifies the meaning of the preceding Y, although the semantic range of jana is not limited to the intensive use in every case. For instance, it has a directional meaning in compound verbs such as cala jana 'to go away'.

45

YAMUNA KACHRU

41. ajkal bahut durghatnae hoti he 'Nowadays many accidents happen'.

42. yah !arai panfpat ke medan me hui thi 'This battle had happened in the field of Panipat'. 43. kya ho raha he? 'What is happening?'. 5.3. In the negative, the simple present form he of the copula hona is deleted in certain contexts e.g., 44. vah is kam ke yogy naM He this job for suitable not 'He (is) not suitable for this job'.

45. yah kitab sasti naM This book cheap not This book (is) not cheap'. The same applies to the simple present form he of the tense auxiliary (cf. rule viii); compare the following statements and their negatives:

46. ram skul jata he 'Ram goes to school'. 47. vah kai bar kalkatte gaya he 'He has gone to Calcutta many times'.

48. ram skul naM jata 'Ram doesn't go to school'. 49. vah kabhi kalkatte nahf gaya He has never gone to Calcutta'.

5.4. C.S. rule (iv) expands the predicate into NP or AP or PPhrase. That is, all the sentences of the type 5

~ ~

NP

Pred-P

VP

Aux

I

~

Predicate

I

AP

46

ho

THE COPULA IN HINDI

are generated by the first four rules of the grammar. These sentences are the source for all NP's in Hindi of the form modifier + N. For instance, sentences such as the following:

50. adri$Y parmatma ne dri$Y jagat ko banaya 'The invisible God created the visible world'. have the following underlying structure

[+

s

DET

s

DET

N

[+

Definite ] parmatma adri$Y he - parmatma Def ] - jagat - Demonstrative God invisible is God - Oem world N

VP

dri$Y he - jagat banaya visible is world made which is made explicit by the following tree-diagram: 5

---------------

NP

DET ] [ +Definite -Demonstrative

5

Pred-P

I

~

NP

Pred-P

I

~

VP

parmatma

I

MV

~

I AP I Ajj

adrifY

parmatma

ha

present

VP

Aux

MV

ya

I

I

~

Aux

I

Predicate

~

N

NP

V

~I

I

DE],

[~g:~J

5

~ I

ban a

~agat

NP

Pred-P

I~

jagat

VP

Aux

MV

present

I

I

~

Predicate

I

ho

AP

I I

Ado J dri~y

47

YAMUNA KACHRU

The relativization and deletion rules transform this to:

jo parmatma adri/jY he us ( parmatma) ne jo jagat dri/jY he us which God invisible is that God which world visible is that (jagat) ko banaya world created 'The God who is invisible created the world which is visible'. Further deletion rules reduce the relative clause, and finally we get:

50. adri/jY parmatma ne dri/jY jagat ko banaya The sentences containing NP's with comparative or superlative Adjectives are derived similarly. For instance, the underlying structure of

radha sUa se sundar he 'Radha is more beautiful than Sita'. is as follows: 5 NP

Pred-P

~

I

radha

Aux

VP

I

I

MV

~

AP

~ ~

5

se

~

NP

Pred-P

I~

slta

VP

Aux

MV

present

I

I

~

AP

I

i

di

sundar

48

ho

ho

Ad i

~ //

present

1

sundar

THE COPULA IN HINDI

5.5. All the periphrastic constructions in Hindi that signify possession and various other relations of N to N are derived from an underlying structure of the following type: 5

~

NP

Pred-P

~

YP

Aux

I

MY

~

Predicate

I

ho

PPhrase

~

NP

PP

The following sentences are examples of possessive constructions in which an animate N is said to possess something: 51. ram ke ek beta hs 'Ram has a son'. 52. ram ke pas ek kitab hs Ram of possession a book is 'Ram has a book'. 53. ram ko sirdard hs Ram to headache is 'Ram has a headache'. 54. ram me bara utsah hs Ram in much enthusiasm is 'Ram has much enthusiasm'.

That is, the possessor N is in the oblique case and is followed by a simple postposition (ke in 51, ko in 53, me in 54) or a complex postposition (ke pas in 52), and the possessed N is in the direct case. Sentences such as the following, with NP's containing possessive forms, are derived from underlying structures such as that given below: 55. ram ka beta yaha bs!ha hs 'Ram's son is seated here'. 56. uska sirdard !hik ho gaya 'His headache got better'.

49

YAMUNA KACHRU

NP

~---~l DET [+Def]

5

N

~

NP

Pred-P

I~

beta

VP

VP

I

~

beta

PLace

I

I

yaMi

Aux

I

MV V

Aux

~

Asp

Tense

ya

he

I

I

MV

I

beth

~

ho

Predicate

I

PPhrase

~

NP

PP

ram

ke

I

I

Rules that delete the identical N's and the copula verb structure that goes through agreement rules and results in:

+

Aux leave a

55. ram ka beta yaM be{ha he 5.6. The underlying structure 5

~

Pred-P

NP

~

VP

Aux

I

MV

~

Predicate

I

ho

PPhrase

is interesting from the point of view of NP-complement constructions also. Elsewhere I have suggested that the abstract nouns that occur in the NP in the above structure have to be sub-categorized according to whether they take a sentential complement or not.13 13 Kachru, Yamuna, 'Nominal and Verbal Complement Constructions in Hindi', paper presented at the second regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago, April 2, 1966, (unpublished).

50

THE COPULA IN HINDI

Consider the following sentences containing such complements: 57. ram ko santo$ hua ki mil sakusallJ! af Ram to satisfaction happened that mother safely returned 'Ram was pleased that mother came back safely'. 58. mujhko dukh he ki tum nahf a sakoge me to sorrow is that you not come will be able 'I am sorry that you will not be able to come'. 59. sita ko xusi hui ki ram saphal ho gaya Sita to pleasure happened that Ram successful became 'Sita was pleased that Ram was successful'.

The underlying structure of such sentences is: 5

NP

Pred-P

~

N

VP

I

[ XUSI

[

[

MV

yo

Gen

~

NP

[+def, +proximate] yah

5

~ NP

[+PRO] +Abstract

I~

ram

VP

Aux

MV

yo

I

I

~

Predicate ho

I

AP

ho

I

N

Pred-P

Aux

~

Predicate

ka

~

DET

~

DET

PPhrase

~

NP

PP

Slto

ko

I

I

Opr ja

I

Ali sapha/

is bat ki ram saphal ho gaya - ki xu.si sUa ko hui This fact that Ram successful became of pleasure Sita to happened 'Sita was pleased of this that Ram became successful'.

Deletion and extraposition transformations apply to this underlying structure and transform it to 59. sUa ko xu.si hui ki ram saphal ho gaya

51

YAMUNA KACHRU

5.7. The copula ho is one of the few verbs that accept a nominalization as their subject N. For example:

60. bacco ka nange piiv ghUmna accha nahi Children of unshod feet wandering proper not 'It is not proper for children to wander around without shoes'. 61. tumhara yo bimar rahna a/sos ki bat he your thus ill remaining regret of matter is 'Your thus being ill is a matter of regret'. The underlying structure of such sentences is: S Pred-P

NP

~

~ DET

S

VP

Nr+proJ

~l+Abst

Compltzr

~

ko

NP

no

Pred-P

~

VP

Aux

Aux

I

MV

~

Predicate

I

ho

{::} The Nominalization transformation applies to this underlying structure and performs the following operations: a) deletes the Aux of the constituent S; b) attaches the ka of the complementizer ka-na to the NP and na to the VP of the constituent S; c) embeds the string NP + Gen + VP + na - derived from the constituent S - in the N position of the matrix S.

[ + PRO ] + Abstract 5.8. The imperfect and perfect participle forms of a class of Hindi verbs function as verbal adjectives; in transforming verbs to adjectives, the past participle form hua, of hona, is said to function as an adjectivizer.14 Consider the following sentences and adjectival phrases derived from them:

62. pani bah raha he 'water is flowing'. 63. gari cal raM he 'vehicle is moving'.

62a. bahta hua panf 'flowing water'. 63a. calti hui gari 'moving vehicle'.

O. Kellogg, op. cit. Section 745, pp. 444-8 (1955); Sharma, op. cit. Section 245 (b), pp. 79-80; Guru, op. cit. Section 377, p. 273.

14

52

THE COPULA IN HINDI

64. phUl khil rahe he 'flowers are blooming'. 65. dhobi kapre dho raha he 'dhobi is washing clothes'. 66. baeea soya he

'child {is aSleep} '. has slept 67. nJkar ne kam sikha he 'servant has learnt (the) job'.

64a. khilte hue phill 'blooming flowers'. 65a. kapre dhota hua dhobi 'dhobi washing clothes'. 66a. soya hua baeca (having slept child). 67a. kam sikha hua nJkar (having learnt the job servant).

Whereas all verbs undergo the transformation that results in imperfect participial adjectival phrases such as the ones in 62a-65a, only a sub-class of intransitive and transitive verbs undergoes the transformation that yields perfect participial phrases such as 66a and 67a.l 5 All transitive verbs, however, yield perfect participial adjectival phrases of the type: 68. ram ne kitab parhi 'Ram read the book'. 69. dhobi ne kapre dhoye 'The dhobi washed the clothes'.

68a. ram ki parhi hui kitab Ram of read book 'The book read by Ram'. 69a. dhobi ke dhoye hue kapre dhobi of washed clothes 'The clothes washed by the dhobi'.

That is, all transitive sentences can be transformed to yield adjectival phrases that modify the object N. There are, however, only a few transitive verbs that yield adjectival phrases that modify the subject N. Intransitive verbs such as the following do not undergo the transformation that yields perfect participial adjectival phrases: 70. ghora tez dJra 'The horse ran fast'. 71. larki uehli 'The girl jumped'.

*70a. tez dJra hua ghora 'fast having run horse'. *71 a. uehlf huf larkf 'Having jumped girl'.

It is interesting to note that the verbs that yield perfect participial adjectival phrases are the ones which have a stative meaning in the perfective, e.g., the event described by the perfective verb has a more lasting effect;

72. 73. 74. 75.

larka betha baeea soya nJkar ne kam sikh /iya usne sabak samejh /iya

'The boy is seated'. 'The child is asleep'. 'The servant has learnt his job'. 'He has understood the lessons'.

15 There does not seem to be any other syntactic feature that is shared by all the verbs in this sub-class.

53

YAMUNA KACHRU

The verbs that do not yield such phrases do not have such a meaning in the perfective; instead, they imply that an event has taken place whose effect is momentary, e.g. 76. larki uchlf 77. ghora c'5ka

'The girl jumped'. 'The horse was startled'.

Notice that the perfective of hona has the same stative meaning that the former class of verbs has. 5.9. The inflected form of the past participle of hona, i.e., the form hue is said to adverbialize the imperfect and perfect participle forms of verbs 16, e.g., 78. lark! h;ste hue bhag gai 'The girl ran away laughing'. 79. vah muskarate hue bola ... 'He said smilingly .. .'. 80. maZine gajre /iye hue bethi thi flower girls garlands having taken seated were 'The flower girls were sitting with garlands'. 81. vah sarab piye hue para tha He alcohol having drunk was lying 'He was lying having drunk alcoholic drinks'. 82. usne calte hue kaha ... 'He said while leaving .. .'. 83. vah khate hue soc raha tha ... 'He was thinking while eating .. .'.

5.10. There is a class of verbs in Hindi which takes a nominal complement which is derived from an underlying copula sentence or a sentence containing a verb which takes a predicate complement. The following sentences containing such verbs exemplify the verbal complement construction 17 : 84. larko ne kamra sa! kiya The boys made the room clean 'The boys cleaned the room'. 85. me ram ko apna bhai manta h~ '1 consider Ram my brother'. 86. raja ne brahmal} ko apna mantri banaya 'The king made the Brahmin his minister'. Sharma, op. cit., Sections 245 (c) and 246 (c), p. 80; Kellogg, loco cit. Guru, op. cit., Section 348, p. 276. 17 See f.n. 13.

16

54

THE COPULA IN HINDI

The underlying structure of the above sentences is as follows: S

~

NP

Pred-P

~

VP

Aux

I

MV

~

NP

v

5

~

NP

Pred-P

~

VP

Aux

I

MV

~

ho

Predicate

I

{~:} For the verbal complement transformation to apply, the NP of VP of the matrix sentence and the NP of the constituent sentence must be identical: 5

~

NP

Pred-P

~

I mE

VP

Aux

I

I

ta hD

MV

'I'll 5

ram

~

NP

man

Pred-P

I~

ram

VP

Aux

I

I

MV

~

Predicate

I

Present

ho

NP

~

mera

bhai

55

YAMUNA KACHRU

5.11. In addition to simple verbs, most grammars and textbooks of Hindi discuss complex verbs of V + V, or nominal + V type as 'compound verbs',18 V + Opr. sequence generated by CS rule (iii) in 2.0 generates the V + V type compound verbs which are roughly comparable to V + particle or preposition in English. The nominal + V type verb will be referred to as 'conjunct verb' 19 in the following discussion. Most examples of conjunct verbs given in grammars and textbooks turn out to be sequences of (a) N + V or (b) object N + V or (c) Predicate nominal + V constructions. Consider the following sentences:

87. darvaza band hE

89.

'The door is shut'.

rna ne ram ki prasansa ki I Ram of praise did 'I praised Ram'.

88. ram ki prasansa hui Ram of praise happened 'Ram was praised'.

In the above sentences, band hona 'to be shut', prasansa hona 'to be praised', prasansa karna 'to praise' etc. are said to be conjunct verbs, as they 'form ... but one conception'.20 Actually 87 is an example of Predicate Adjective band, plus hona, 88 of NP plus deleted PPhrase hona, and 89 of object NP V.21 18 See Kellogg, op. cit., Sections 425-7, pp. 257-71 (1955); Greaves, op. cit., Section 281, pp. 328-9 and Sections 282-306, pp. 330-54(1933); Guru, op. cit., Sections 400--26, pp. 310-25; Sharma, op. cit., Chapter XIII, pp. 86-98; Burton-Page, op. cit., and Hacker, op. cit., and Zur Funktion einiger Hilfsverben im modernen Hindi, Mainz Akademie, 1958 (review by Burton-Page in BSOAS XXIII, 1960). 19 The term was first used by Burton-Page in his 'Compound and Conjunct Verbs in Hindi', BSOAS XIX, 1957. 20 Kellogg, op. cit., Section 448, p. 271. 21 That is, the underlying structures of the sentences 87-89 are as follows:

87.

5

88.

~

Pred-P

NP

I

~

darvaza

VP

Aux

I

I

MV

~

Predicate

I AP

I Ad" IJ band

56

5

~

Pred-P

NP

~

ram kT prasansa

present

~

VP

Aux

MV

yo

I

I

~

Predicate

ho

ho

I

PPhrase

~

NP

I [+PRO]

kisT

se

THE COPULA IN HINDI

Notice that in conjunct verbs, whereas the verb karna functions as a PRO-transitive verb, the verb hona functions as a PRO-intransitive verb. It is reasonable to assign the status ofPRO-Vs to hona and karna in conjunct verbs, as they are merely carriers of the verbal idea; the lexical meaning of the conjunct V is supplied by the nominal element. 6.0. It is not clear how the following usages of hona could be treated systematically in a grammar of Hindi. Usually they have been treated as idiomatic. 22 A few examples follow:

90. vah uske sath ho /iya He him with accompany 'He accompanied him'.

91.

me abhi bazar se ho kar ala hi1 I just now bazaar from having been come 'I shall come back presently, after having been to the bazaar'.

92. gari banaras se hoti hui ilahabad jati he Train Benares through via Allahabad goes 'The train goes to Allahabad via Benares'. IV. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

7.0. In the preceding pages I have presented the description of copula in Hindi in the general framework of the verbal syntax of Hindi. It has been made clear that in the absence of an adequate description of Hindi syntax, the semantic component of Hindi grammar has to wait. Hence it was not possible to give detailed semantic information about the copula. In Section Cf. Sharma, op. cit., Section 260 (b) and (e), p. 88; and Guru, op. cit., Section 412, p.319.

22

89.

5

~

NP

Pred-P

~~

m£

ne

VP

Aux

MV

ya

I

I

~

NP

~

ram kT prasansa

V

I

kar

It has been assumed that in 88, the PRO-N phrase kisi se 'by someone' has been deleted, i.e. the underlying sentence was ram ki prasansa kisi se hui 'Ram was praised by someone'.

57

YAMUNA KACHRU

5, I have, however, mentioned the main semantic functions of the copula in the language. I have also given some contrastive examples to show how the semantic function of copula in Hindi differs from another Indo-Aryan language, Bengali.23 This may be of interest both to philosophers interested in the philosophy of language and to linguists interested in semantics. 24

University of Illinois SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, W.S.: 1950--1, 'A Study in the Analysis of Hindi Sentence Structure', Acta Linguistica6. Bahl, K.C.: 1964, A Study in the Transformational Analysis of Hindi Verb, Dept. of South Asian Studies, University of Chicago (mimeographed). Bahl, K. C.: 1967, A Reference Grammar of Hindi, Dept. of South Asian Studies, University of Chicago (mimeographed). Burton-Page,J.G.: 1957, 'Compound and Conjunct Verbs in Hindi', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 19. Burton-Page, J.G.: 1957, 'Participial Forms in Hindi', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 19. Burton-Page, J.G.: 1960, Review of Paul Hacker's Zur Funktion einiger Hi/fsverben im modernen Hindi (Mainz-Akademie, 1958), Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 22. Greaves, E.: 1919, Hindi Grammar, Indian Press Ltd., Allahabad, India, 1919. Guru,K.P.: 1920, Hindi Vyakaran, Kashi Niigari PrachiiriIJ.i Sabha, Banaras. Hacker, P.: 1958, Zur Funktion einiger Hi/fsverben im modernen Hindi, Mainz-Akademie. Hacker, P.: 1961, 'On the Problem of a Method for Treating the Compound and Conjunct Verbs in Hindi', Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 24. Kachru, Yamuna: 1965, A Transformational Treatment of Hindi Verbal Syntax. Ph.D. Dissertation, London University (unpublished). Kachru, Yamuna: 1965, 'Some Rules for Passive and Causative Sentences in Hindi', paper presented at the Linguistic Society of America meeting at Chicago, December 27. Kachru, Yamuna: 1966, 'Nominal and Verbal Complement Constructions in Hindi', paper presented at the second regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, April 2. Kachru, Yamuna: 1966, 'On Possessives in Hindi'. Paper presented at the American Oriental Society meeting in Philadelphia, April 20. Kachru, Yamuna: 1966, Introduction to Hindi Syntax, University of Illinois, Urbana (mimeographed). Kachru, Yamuna: 1967, 'The ko-sentences in Hindi', paper presented at the conference on Hindi Syntax held under the auspices of the Inter-University Summer Program in South Asian Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana, August 5. Kachru, Yamuna: 1968, 'On the so-called conjunct verbs of Hindi', paper presented at the conference on Current Trends in Indian Linguistics, with special reference to Hindi, Delhi, April 6. 23 Perhaps it should be mentioned here that, by and large, the observations made in this study on Hindi apply to the syntax of Urdu and Hindustani as well. 24 Most of the tree diagrams given above represent abbreviated underlying structures, i.e., they do not contain all the nodes that a strict step-by-step rewriting of CS rules will specify. Also, the analysis of comparative adjective and nominal complement constructions, as well as sentences such as ram ki prasansa hui are still tentative.

58

THE COPULA IN HINDI

Kellogg, S.H.: 1875, A Grammar of the Hindi Language, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Sharma, A.: 1958, A Basic Grammar of Modern Hindi, Ministry of Education and Research, Govt. of India. Vajpeyi, K. D.: 1957, Hindi Shabdiinushiisan, Kashi Nagari Pracharini Sabha, Banaras. Verma, M. K.: 1966, A Synchronic Comparative Study of the Structure of Noun Phrase in English and Hindi, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (unpublished). Verma, S. K.: 1964, A Study in Systemic Description of Hindi Grammar and Comparison of the English and Hindi Verbal Group, Ph.D. Dissertation, Edinburgh University (unpublished).

59

STANLEY NEWMAN

ZUNI EQUIVALENTS OF ENGLISH 'TO BE'

It is an instructive exercise to compare the structuring of ideas in different languages. By revealing the extent to which languages differ in their organization of concepts, the comparison serves to emphasize the naivete of a belief in the absolute validity of anyone conceptual system. It also serves to underline the importance of maintaining a relativistic point of view, difficult as this is for most people, whose habits of expression have been developed within the structure of one language. The OED lists 24 'specifications and uses' of 'be', organized under four main branches of meaning, with a fifth branch consisting of idiomatic 'phraseological combinations'. It summarizes the meanings as follows: The primary sense appears to have been that of branch II below, 'to occupy a place' (i.e., to sit, stand, lie, etc.) in some specified place; thence the more abstract branch I was derived by abstracting the notion of particular place so as to emphasize that of actual existence, 'to be somewhere, no matter where, to be in the universe, or realm of fact, to have a place among existing things, to exist.' Branch III was derived from II by weakening the idea of actual presence into the merely intellectual conception of 'having a place' in a class of notions, or 'being identical with' another notion .... Branch IV is an obvious extension of III: cf. 'it was annoying to me', with 'it was annoying me'. 1 1. ZUNI 'TEY A' AND THE ZERO COPULA 2

The closest lexical equivalent to English to be in Zuni is the verb teya, some of whose semantic functions are the same as some of the meanings of to be. 1 A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Vol. I, edited by James A.H. Murray, The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1888, p. 717. 2 Zuni is spoken by a group of pueblo Indians living in the Southwestern United States. The following are the phonemes used for transcribing Zuni forms: /p, t, c, C(the 'ch' sound of English), k, kw, ?, s, s (the 'sh' sound of English), I (a voiceless lateral fricative), h, m, n, I, w, y; i, i· (the raised dot indicates a long vowel), e, e·, a, a·, 0, 0', u, U·. Because the heavy stress falls automatically on the first syllable of words, stress is not marked. Additional information on the language will be found in my 'A Practical Zuni Orthography' in: J. H. Roberts and Watson Smith, Zuni Law: A Field of Values, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeolo!;y and Ethnology, Harvard University, 43, no. 1 (1954), 163-70; Zuni Dictionary, Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, publication 6 (1958); Zuni Grammar, University of New Mexico Publications in Anthropology, no. 14 (1965). The Zuni Grammar contains a bibliography of other sources dealing with the language.

60 1.W,M. Verhaar (ed.), The Verb 'Be' and its Synonyms 1,60-70. All rights reseYl'ed.

ZUNI EQUIVALENTS OF ENGLISH 'TO BE'

The meaning of 'to occupy a place', which the 0 E D regards as the primary sense of the English verb, is expressed by teya 3 :

Ii"! teya-ye here (to be)-(present tense): It is here. hop to? teya-?ka where you (to be)-(past tense): Where were you?

The notion of 'being identical with', the meaning assigned to branch III of the OED, is another common semantic function of teya: ho?n?a'wan to? ta'lak?

cuwap ?uhsi teya-?ka

teya-k?anna our you (male relative by marriage) (to be)-(future tense): Will you be our son-in-law? who that (to be)-(past tense): Who was that?

Utterances without verbs are widely used in Zuni. In some of these utterances the functions of the 'zero verb' are the same denotatively, though perhaps different in stylistic implications, as the use of teya in the present tense. Predications referring to present (or timeless) location or identity the two meanings of teya discussed above - may be expressed by the zero copula: hop tom ?uwe where your wool: Where is your wool? ho?n?a'wan ta'lak?i our (male relative by marriage): He is our son-in-law? In addition to these two meanings, Zuni teya also has meanings which extend into the semantic range of other English lexemes: hot ?isk?on teya-ye

I there (to live)-(present tense): I am living there. tey-?a (to stay)-locative: The place where he is staying.

It should be pointed out, however, that the glosses 'to live' and 'to stay' add specifying ideas which are not expressed in the Zuni verb but are necessary in English for making the proper distinctions in a semantically related set of verbs. To indicate location in a place, to be (rather than to live or to stay) is used in English with reference to non-living things: e.g., the house is on 3 In the examples, the convention is adopted of inserting a hyphen between the morphemes of the Zuni word being illustrated. Two translations are provided: a word-by-word translation or, for the illustrated Zuni form, a morpheme-by-morpheme translation, followed by a smoother rendering in more normal English. In the literal translation, each Zuni word is glossed by a single English word, wherever possible, or by a series of words enclosed in parentheses.

61

STANLEY NEWMAN

First Street. But for animate subjects, especially human things, to live is selected when the location is relatively permanent or continuous, to stay when it is more temporary or intermittent: he lives in the house on First Street, he stays in the house on First Street. The sentence, he is in the house on First Street, denotes an even more transient localization. These distinctions of animate versus inanimate subject and of permanent versus transient location are not involved in any group of Zuni verbs which include teya. If, conversely, English to stay were translated back into Zuni, the native gloss in most contexts would probably be the verb Pima. But Pima contains semantic increments beyond the meaning of to stay, for it belongs to a set of verbs which distinguish singular versus plural subject and specify various kinds of position in space. Zuni Pima, on the one hand, denotes a singular subject in contrast to tina, which has reference to a plural subject with the same range of verbal meanings. On the other hand, Pima has the more restricted meaning, to be in a sitting position; on this semantic level it contrasts with Pela (singular subject) to be in a standing position and cuwa (singular subject) to be in a lying position. It seems that all words contain these hidden specifications of meaning by virtue of their membership in semantic subsystems. A specification contained in teya, wherein it differs fundamentally from to be, lies in its membership in the form-meaning set of verb class 9. 4 This class of verbs manifests, in addition to a few distinctive morphological features, the semantic distinctiveness of referring to states or conditions. The contrast between static and active verbs is pervasive in Zuni but receives little attention in the system of English. In fact, English to be includes both static and active meanings. All English dictionaries I have consulted reflect English patterns, quite naturally, in combining under one semantic rubric the static meanings of to be (paraphrased as to exist, have reality, etc.) with its active meanings (paraphrased as to happen, occur, take place, etc.). Zuni verbs of class 9 can be activized by the addition of derivational suffixes which change the verbs to one or another of the active classes. By undergoing such derivational processes, teya can shift its verb class and assume active meanings. The first of the following examples illustrates a derivation of teya with one of the active meanings of to be:

le?n ?ino·te teya-ti-ka thus ancient (to be)-inchoative-(past tense): This is the way it happened long ago. tey-?u-nna (to be)-causative-(future tense): He will start it; i.e., cause to be is equivalent to start. 4

Zuni Grammar, § 9.1.

62

ZUNI EQUIVALENTS OF ENGLISH 'TO BE' II. OTHER STATIC VERBS IN ZUNI

Many verbs of class 9 are best rendered in English by to be in the following three types of verb phrases: 1) to be plus predicate noun: rara to be a hole; rakli to be a fire; palto to be a boundary; tena to be music; yala to be a mountain. 2) to be plus predicate adjective: relre to be daring; kroksi to be good; lucrina to be pliable; mola to be straight; pinna to be windy. 3) to be plus predicate preposition (or prepositional phrase): raya to be on, to be on top of; rina to be like; ruli to be inside of; kreyato to be up; pakwkwi to be beside. This type of semantic description, of course, employs the arbitrary device of arranging Zuni forms in terms of English syntactic patterns which include to be. As such, it is more revealing of English than of Zuni structure, where teya and the three sets of stems illustrated above are all members of a single class of static verbs. From the point of view of English, however, some Zuni verbs of class 9 are equivalent to an English predicate phrase composed of to be, with its meaning of 'being identical with' (branch III of the OED definition), plus a noun or an adjective: rara-ye relre-rka

(to be a hole)-(present tense): It is a hole, or there is a hole. (to be daring)-(past tense): He used to be daring.

The combination of to be plus a preposition is not regarded in English as a syntactic unit; an analysis based on English form feeling would link the preposition in 'he was in the house' with the following noun rather than with the preceding copula. But it is otherwise in Zuni. A relational concept, which is expressed primarily by the preposition in English, is rendered in Zuni in one of two ways. It may be part of a single lexeme, as illustrated above, which refers to a static event as well as a relational notion; in this form the lexeme belongs to a class of words which also includes references to static events plus entities (primarily nouns in English) or static events plus attributes (primarily adjectives in English). Or the relational idea may be a separate word, a particle 5; this is a class of words which, like the static verbs, includes references to entities, attributes, or relations: 1) entities: halo red ant; liSsu clover. 2) attributes: kWammasi worthless, unimportant; samma alone. 3) relations: rakka with, in; ran of, for. 5 There are three major word classes in Zuni, defined by the morphological criterion of inflection. Verbs are marked by being inflected for tense, mode, or subordination; nouns and pronouns are inflected for number - pronouns, in addition, for case; and particles are uninflected words.

63

STANLEY NEWMAN

In short, then, these three types of concepts are handled uniformly in Zuni, either as concepts expressed in separate lexemes or as components of a static event; all three are actualized in forms belonging to the same class of words, either particles or class 9 verbs. Verb class 9 is unique in possessing many stems which are also noun stems. This formal association with nouns underlines the static nature of class 9 verbs, for nouns in Zuni are all references to entities. The most direct semantic relationship between nouns and class 9 verbs is that in which the verb predicates the existence of the entity denoted by the noun: ?akli-nne fire-singular: a fire. ?akli-ye (to be afire)-(present tense): It is afire, there is afire. More frequently, however, the verb predicates an attribute or an entity with a wider range of meaning than its related noun: pisse-nne pisse-?kan

cloth-singular: a cloth. (to be thin)-(resultative subordinate): in order to be thin. yalto-'we (cradle board)-plural: cradle boards. yalto-k?anna (to be on a surface)-(future tense): He will be on it (e.g., the floor). tena-'we song-plural: songs. tena-?ka (to be music)-(past tense): There was music.

But the overlapping of nouns with class 9 verbs does not include all members: most noun stems do not have membership in verb class 9, and most verb stems of this class are not paralleled by nouns. Although some class 9 verbs can be rendered in English by the use of a phrase with to be, many of these static verbs cannot be easily translated in this way: ?anikWa to know; ?illi to have, to be married; lito to rain; multi to smell of the sweat offoreigners; woppona to hold (plural objects). If some of these class 9 verbs do not seem to refer to events that are genuinely static in nature, this is due partly to the ambiguous status of the concept in English and partly to the arbitrariness of translation. English makes no formal distinction between static and active events. As pointed out above, the verb to be is itself ambiguous in this respect: it may indicate an unchanging stasis of existence, or it may have reference to an active event which moves into existence. The static to be can be paraphrased by to exist, have a place in the world of fact, which the OED includes in its branch I definition of 'be' along with the active notions of to happen, occur, take place, come into existence. Zuni, on the other hand, makes a sharp contrast

64

ZUNI EQUIVALENTS OF ENGLISH 'TO BE'

between static and active events. The arbitrariness of translation is such that, in order to make explicit the static nature of these Zuni references, one could adopt the convention of glossing the Zuni forms with 'to be in a state of ... ': to know and to have, for example, could then be glossed as to be in a state of knowing and to be in a state of possessing. Translations of this type, however, would be a strain on the thought processes of the reader - insofar as he thinks in English - and would do violence to the language. The normal habits of expression in one language can be stretched somewhat to accommodate foreign patterns of meaning; but the more a language is stretched out of its accustomed shape, the more awkward do the translations become. The awkwardness of literal translations in a language is the price that must be paid for achieving greater explicitness in conveying the semantic force of another language. For illustrative purposes thus far, only primary stems of class 9 verbs have been used. But this category of verbs, like nearly all verb classes of Zuni, is an open class: through derivation, members of this class of static verbs can be formed secondarily from verbs of other classes, just as class 9 verbs can undergo derivational processes to become members of active verb or of noun classes. The static suffix, -na, creates verbs of class 9: rutte-na-ye

(to bite)-static-(present tense): He (e.g., the dog) has his jaws clamped on it. kWayi-na-rka (to go out)-static-(past tense): It was sticking out. rorla-na-kranna (to becomefat)-static-(future tense): He will be fat.

The primary stems of these verbs - rutte (verb class 4b), kWayi (verb class 4a), rorla (verb class 1) - are active in meaning, as the translations suggest, and they belong to classes of active verbs. Conversely, a variety of derivational suffixes may be added to stems of class 9 to produce active verbs with membership in active verb classes. In the following examples, the primary stems are static verbs of class 9, which are activized by the derivational element and become members of other verb classes. One of the morphological characteristics differentiating the various verb classes is their selection of distinctive allomorphs of the inflectional suffixes: the phonemic shapes of the tense inflections in the class 9 verbs illustrated above, it will be noted, are somewhat different from the inflectional forms in the examples below: raya-ru-nna (to be on top of)-causative-(future tense): He will put it on top of it. ruwe-ti-ka (to be painful)-inceptive-(past tense): It started to hurt. 65

STANLEY NEWMAN

?alti-ha-0

(to be closed)-( conversive causative punctiliar)(present tense): He opens it.

Ill. ZUNI EQUIVALENTS OF THE PASSIVE AND PROGRESSIVE 'TO BE'

In addition to its other functions, to be is also employed in English as an auxiliary in passive and progressive verb phrases; the OED classifies this function as branch IV. Zuni has no grammatical device equivalent to English for passivizing active verbs. It should be kept in mind that the passive of English and the static of Zuni are semantically different; e.g., for to bite, the passive would be to be bitten, and the static would convey the notion of to have the jaws clamped on it. To achieve the active versus passive contrast, Zuni uses separate lexemes. For some references primary stems are found in the Zuni vocabulary to express the contrast: hemmo to boil; woleya to be boiled. ?ahha to buy; ?ayyo to be bought. salu to stretch; pilla to be stretched. Many primary stems in Zuni are passive in the sense that they are most conveniently glossed in English by passive forms. Such verbs can be changed to the equivalent of an English active verb by the addition of a causative suffix: peha (to be wrapped) or bundle, as a noun; peha-?u (to be wrapped)-causative: to cause it to be wrapped, to wrap it. po?ya (to be covered) or hat, covering, as a noun; po?ya-?u to cause it to be covered, to cover it. Furthermore, morphological and syntactic devices are plentiful in Zuni for deriving verbs and verb phrases which are equivalent to English primary active verbs and their passives with to be: yu-te?Ci-k?a

indeterminate-( to arrive )-causative: to tire it (e.g., a horse); yu-te?Ci to be tired. yu-te?Ci-na-ha indeterminate-( to arrive )-static-( conversive causative punctiliar): to rest it (e.g., a horse); ?i-yu-te?Ci-na reflexive-indeterminate(to arrive) -static: to be rested. ?ito'w?asa food (to make): a phrasallexeme glossed by English to cook; ?ak-na (to become cooked, to become ripe )-static: to be cooked, to be ripe.

If a Zuni, then, were attempting to find equivalents in his language for English passive formations with to be, he would have no single grammatical

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category from which to make his lexical choices. He would be compelled to pick his way through a maze of lexical, morphological, and syntactic patterns in order to find forms with somewhat equivalent semantic contents. Some of his passive equivalents would be primary verb stems, others secondary stems such as causativized verbs, and still others would be verb phrases. He would be in the same situation as the English speaker searching for equivalents to the Zuni static verbs, which are not recognized as a unitary category in the English grammatical system. In addition to its use in passive formations, English to be also enters into the progressive collocation with the -ing form of the verb. The most distinctive function of the progressive, that of indicating the durative aspect of an event, is expressed in Zuni by the continuative, a derivational suffix: kWap toil sem-e'-ila

what you (to askfor)-continuative-(present tense): What are you asking for? y-assuilw-e'-nap-ka reciprocal-( to speak to )-continuative- (plural subject)-(past tense): They were speaking to each other.

To parallel the future tense function of the progressive (as in he is coming tomorrow), Zuni employs an inflectional suffix, which may indicate either the conditional mode or the future tense: tom tena'n hakkra-nna you (to sing) (to ask)-(future or conditional): He will ask you to sing or He would ask you to sing (if ... ). ten-e-nna (to make music) -continuative-(future or conditional): He will be singing or He would be singing (if ... ). In contrast to the English passive, which has no corresponding grammatical rubric in Zuni, the progressive can be translated by derivational and inflectional elements in the Zuni morophological system. IV. SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION

A comparison of the meanings of English to be with the expression of equivalent concepts in Zuni revealed the following: (a) The meanings of location ('to have a place') and equivalence ('to be identical with') in to be are expressed in the Zuni lexeme teya. (b) When reference is to the present tense, the location and equivalence meanings may be indicated in Zuni by the zero copula. (c) Zuni teya has additional meanings, which would be glossed by other English words, such as to stay, to live. (d) Zuni teya is a member of class 9 verbs, which carry a static meaning. 67

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The contrast between static and active is fundamental in the morphological and semantic systems of Zuni but irrelevant to English structure. (e) A predicate phrase consisting of English to be plus a noun, adjective, or preposition is the equivalent of many of the static verbs of class 9. (f) English to be as an auxiliary in the passive formation has no consistent equivalent in Zuni; the contrast between passive and active is irrelevant to Zuni structure. Just as English must use a variety of lexical elements, morphological combinations, and syntactic patterns to arrive at equivalents of Zuni static verbs, so Zuni is compelled to draw upon a diversity of linguistic resources for expressions equivalent to the English passive with to be. (g) Another auxiliary function of English to be, its use with the -ing form of the verb in a progressive construction, is rendered in Zuni by two bound morphemes - a derivational suffix expressing the continuative and an inflectional suffix indicating the future tense. In short, the multiple meanings of English to be can be paralleled in Zuni. But to find the parallels, we are forced to search through unrelated segments of the intricate network of Zuni grammar and vocabulary. Conversely, attempts at rendering Zuni forms into English result in the same untidy process of patching up the lack of equivalence in lexemes with non-equivalent morphological devices and non-equivalent syntactic circumlocutions. The meanings of to be are structured differently in the two languages. Superimposed upon the linguistic differences are differences in culture, which provide non-equivalent orientations for interpreting meanings. Thus, the special interest which we attach to the conceptual content of to be or, in a philosophical context, to the notion of 'Being' arises from its place in the cultural tradition of the West. From the time of classical Greece, philosophers have concerned themselves with a variety of problems associated with the interpretation of Being - problems of reality, existence, essence, Being versus Becoming, etc. But this is a concern that is peculiar to Western Civilization. In other cultures it is not among the common problems to which man has sought answers in his quest for understanding and intellectual satisfaction. I know of no other culture, in fact, which possesses a tradition of ontological inquiry, except for societies in which the tradition has been borrowed from the West. In these cases the similarity between the borrowed product and the original may be scarcely recognizable, because of the nonequivalence of the languages, as Graham has convincingly shown for Chinese 6; and cultural differences may pose even more subtle barriers to the adequate translation of this tradition outside Western Civilization. 6 A. C. Graham, '''Being'' in Western philosophy compared with Shih/ Fei and Yu/ Wu in Chinese philosophy', Arthur Waley Anniversary Volume: Asia Major 7 [new series] (1959), p.79-112.

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Some of the speculative questions which man has asked and tried to answer in many of his cultures are: What is the nature of sickness, of death, of the supernatural world? What is the origin of the world, natural and supernatural? How and where did my people originate? From our point of view these are primarily religious rather than philosophical concerns. But in most cultures there is no specialized group of philosophers as contrasted to priests or shamans. In this regard Zuni culture is no exception. The main responsibility of its priesthood is to maintain the ceremonial life of Zuni village. The elaborate ceremonies not only insure the good will of supernatural powers but also provide dramatic representation of the rich store of mythology, in which Zunis who have not yet accepted the White Man's values can find satisfying answers to their deepest concerns. In short, then, ideas about Being in the philosophical sense are irrelevant to Zuni culture, just as ideas about ?oneyalanne, the sacred cornmeal path, important in Zuni culture, are irrelevant to ours. For translating these ideas, glosses from one language to another are singularly unenlightening; only a lengthy cross-cultural explanation could provide foreigners with an adequate comprehension of the native meaning of these terms. Besides cultural differences of this order, where the significant concepts of one culture have no place in the framework of another, there are less obvious differences which get in the way of translation. One of the class 9 verb stems illustrated above, ?aya-?u-nna He will put it on top of it, has an associated meaning, He will bewitch him. The relationship between these meanings is cultural, not logical. It is based on one of the practices of Zuni witches: they can perform contagious magic by obtaining material intimately connected with their intended victim - a piece of cloth from his shirt, a lock of his hair - and placing it on top of a bluff or high in a tree. This association of ideas is self-evident to Zunis but is foreign to the fund of cultural knowledge which English speakers normally bring to their perception of meanings. As Katz and Fodor have brilliantly demonstrated in their recent paper, a complete semantic theory would be impossible to construct, for it would demand a systematic representation of 'ALL the knowledge speakers have about the world'. 7 To use one of their examples, alligator shoes and horse shoes are structurally similar but we interpret them differently on the basis of non-linguistic information: In our cultural world we know that women's shoes may be made of alligator skin but that alligators do not wear shoes; hence, we select the interpretation 'shoes made of alligator skin' rather than 'shoes for alligators'. We select the opposite interpretation for horse shoes, 7

'The structure of a semantic theory', Language 39 (1963), 178.

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for our cultural expenence tells us that, unlike alligators, horses wear shoes and that, in contrast to alligator skin, horse hide is not used for making shoes. To the extent that speakers of two languages share the same 'knowledge ... about the world', their meanings are mutually translatable. To the extent that their knowledge is not shared, the translation of meanings will require extensive footnotes which attempt to explicate the knowledge appropriate to one culture in terms of the knowledge shared in another. University of New Mexico

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THE MODERN GREEK VERBS OF 'BEING'

I. INTRODUCTION

This paper does not purport to be an exhaustive treatment of 'being' in Modern Greek. It is merely a bird's-eye view of the various Modern Greek verbs which express the following functions of 'to be': i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi.

copula with noun: 'He is a man' 1; roles: 'He is a soldier'; copula with adjective: 'He is tall'; identity: 'He is Charles'; copula with location: 'He is in Paris'; and existence: 'There is a man'.

Rather than base this study on a fictitious 'overall-pattern' sort of Modern Greek, I have considered only one very widespread variety of the language, namely dhimotiki as spoken by educated Athenians. This is what 'Modern Greek' means here. No construction has been included which was not considered grammatical by the two native speakers on whose speech this paper is based. 2 Sociolinguistically speaking, one can hardly speak of educated Modern Greek and ignore katharevusa. Nevertheless, I have chosen to do so, for the reason that someone writing in katharevusa may in theory use just about any Ancient Greek construction which he feels he has a need for.3 Yet this paper is supposed to deal with Modern Greek. 1 These functions of 'to be' were suggested to me by A.C. Graham's 1959 paper (see references). The examples accompanying each function are also his. I have greatly profited from my correspondence with A. C. Graham, Charles H. Kahn, and John W. M. Verhaar. Moreover,. Graham and Kahn kindly sent me preliminary drafts of their contributions to this series, respectively on Classical Chinese and Ancient Greek. 2 The two informants were Dr. Maria Tenezakis and myself. I am very much indebted to Dr. Tenezakis for going over earlier drafts ofthis paper and for making many valuable suggestions. 3 To illustrate this point, let me give an example from a katharevusa translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics (Aristotle (1953),0 7.1049a, pp. 400-1): original translation IitavoiuC; ... npOUn09EO'lC; liui 'ttlV ev'tEA.EXEt(l1(tlV ... opOC; lit 'toO J,ltv ev'tEA.EXEi~ ytYVOJ,lEVOU tK 'tOU OVVUPIlI YEVEO'tV 'ttvoC; cl1tO 'ttlV KU'tUcrtUO'lV 'toO ov'to~ ... IiUVUJ,lEt ov'tOC; ...

ano

(Italics are mine.) The Ancient Greek expression IiUVUJ,lEt oV'tOC; is merely transposed in the katharevusa version. Still, the meaning 'that which is (something), that which exists' of ov is readily available only to those speakers of Modern Greek who 'know their classics', however slightly. In Modern Greek, 'to QV is a noun meaning 'being, creature'.

71 J. W.M. Verhaar (ed.), The Verb 'Be' and its Synonyms 2,71-87. All rights reserved.

KOSTAS KAZAZIS

II. THE VERBS OF 'BEING'

We shall begin by giving a brief outline of the verbs which express the various meanings of 'to be' in Modern Greek.

EljJ.rxl. 4 This is the verb which expresses most of the meanings of 'to be'. As we shall see below, the only semantic area in which the use of dJla! is rather restricted is the existential one. As is so often the case with the verb 'to be' in the languages of the world, EiJla! differs rather markedly from other mediopassive Modern Greek verbs. 5 To begin with, it is highly defective. It has only two sets of forms, namely a present one 6 , and a past one, plus an uninflected present participle, ov'ra~. The very form of the latter is peculiar, in that it is identical with the present participle of active verbs 7: cf. cnpUpi/;Ol 'to whistle', crq)\)pi/;ov't(l~ '(while) whistling'. Normally the present participle of mediopassive verbs is fully inflected and ends in -VJlEV-O~/-T]/-o, respectively Nsg. masc./fem./neuter. 8 Moreover, oV't(l~ '(while, etc.) being' is not very common in urban speech. It is often replaced by some circumlocution or even by the fully inflected learned (Ancient Greek) present participle, roy. Thus, besides (1)

va

(0 r1(ivvT]~, oV't(l~ li1tE1PO~, OEV ~~EPE 'ti lit. 'the John being inexperienced not he-knew what that KaVEl

he-does' 'John, being inexperienced, did not know what to do' As there is no infinitive in Modern Greek, we shall follow the native convention of referring to verbs by the first person singular present. Thus £lllal literally means 'I am'. 5 Modern Greek verbs are traditionally classified into active (or co-verbs) and mediopassive (or Ilal-verbs). There are important formal differences between these two types of verbs, not unlike the differences which exist between the active and the passive voice of Latin verbs. 6 It would perhaps be more correct to speak of 'non-past' rather than of 'present'. This question, however, is not directly relevant to the present study. Suffice it to say here that the future and the simple conditional are formed respectively from the present and the past by means of the proclitic particle 9u. Thus, E{llal 'I am', 9u EIllal 'I'll be'; ftllouva 'I was', 9u ftllouva 'I'd be'. The same is true ofthe relationship between perfect and future perfect, on the one hand, and past perfect and perfect conditional, on the other. Thus, iixco tEAEunOEl 'I have finished', 9u iixco tEAEUiloEl 'I'll have finished'; EIxa tEAEunOEt 'I had finished', 9u dxa tEA.euiloEt 'I'd have finished'. 7 This is occasionally the case also in poetic language and in folk speech, where some deponent verbs have active participles. For examples, see TptavtaqlUAAiollC; (1941), § 971 and footnote 2, p. 374. 8 Mediopassive present participles are rather rare in dhimotiki. Either they have become adjectives or else they are considered learned. More details in TptavtaqlUAAiollC; (1941), §§ 976-979, pp. 375-6. 4

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we also find (2)

(0 rUIVVT]~, crav lim;tpo~ 1tOll il't'ave, ~EV il~epe lit. 'the John as inexperienced that he-was not he-knew 't'i va dvet what that he-does' (same meaning as (1))

and (3)

(0 naVVT]~, li1tetpo~ (J)v, ~EV il~epe 't'i va lit. 'the John inexperienced being not he-knew what that KaVet he-does' (same meaning as (1))

EIJ1at presents no imperfective vs. perfective aspectual contrasts like most other Modern Greek verbs. 9 Its endings are essentially those of the imperfective present and past of mediopassive verbs. The only forms where elJ1at differs from other mediopassive verbs are the 3sg. and 3pl. present and the 3pl. past. Here is the full conjugation of the present and past of e1J1at, together with the corresponding imperfective tenses of a regular mediopassive verb, KotJ1a.J1at 'to sleep', for the purpose of comparison:

Isg. 2sg. 3sg. 1pI. 2pl. 3pl. Isg. 2sg. 9

'to be' Present eiJ1at elcrat e1vat etJ1acr't'e dcr'tE or eicracr'tE e1vat Past 11110UV(a) 11 crouv(a)

'to sleep' Imperfective Present KotJ1a.J1at KotJ1a.crat KOtJ1a.'t'at KotJ16J1acr't'e K0111ucr'tE or KOl116cracr'tE KotJ1o(jv't'at Imperfective Past KotJ16J1ouv(a) KotJ16crouv(a)

Here is an example of two sentences differing only as to the aspect of the verb: (4) Sci 1100 lHvlll 'to KAllllii lit. '(fut.) to-me gives the key' (ipf.)

'He'll be giving me the key' (on repeated occasions) Here Sci liivlll 'he'll be giving' is an imperfective future - cf. Russian on budet davat' mne kljuc. (5) Sci 1l0U limO-ill 'to KAllllii lit. '(fut.) to-me gives the key' (pf.)

'He'll give me the key' (on one particular occasion) Here aci limO-ill 'he'll give' is a perfective future - cf. Russian on dast mne kljuc.

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3sg. 1pI. 2pI. 3pI.

TJ'tUV or l1'tUVE 10 11 JlUcr'tE l1crUcr'tE TJ'tUV or l1'tUVE

KOtJlO'tUV( E) KOtJlOJlucr'tE KotJlOcrUcr'tE KotJlOV'tUV(E) or KOtJlOV'toucruv

It is interesting to note that EIJlat is the only verb in Modern Greek in

which the 3sg. and the 3pI. are not distinguished: present dvat, past TJ'tuv or 11'tUVE.1 1 The imperative is expressed by means of va-clauses: (6)

Na Elcrat cr1tAUXVtKO~ lit. 'that you-are merciful' 'Be merciful'

This is essentially true of the imperfective imperative of all mediopassive verbs. Mediopassive verbs with stem-stress, such as ~upil;;oJlat 'to shave (oneself)', potentially have imperfective imperative forms: ~upil;;ou, ~upiI;;Ecr'tE respectively 2sg. and 2pl. But even there the va-clause alternative is far more common: va ~upiI;;EcrUt, va ~upiI;;Ecr'tE. As far as ElJlat is concerned, one may sometimes hear the imperative forms EcrO, ecr'tE, respectively 2sg. and 2pl., but these are borrowed from Ancient Greek and can hardly be considered as dhimoliki forms. Finally, EtJlat has no past participle and no compound tenses. Thus, 'He was a student', 'He has been a student', and 'He had been a student' are all rendered by the only past tense that ElJlat has: (7)

YH'tuvE