[tied] Re: To be or not to be... or to have.

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Glen Gordon" <glengordon01@...>
wrote:

>
> >You've established the first stage. What's your example for the
> >second stage? Semantically, I can see an intermediate stage as a
> >verb of location, "There's the wolf on the hill" => "The wolf is

on

> >the hill", but are there any examples of even that change?
>
> Actually, at this point, I'm saying that the change involved the
> growing dependance on *es- in what were originally verbless
> sentences. Basically the pattern of S-O-ZERO came to be too
> awkward and it ached for a verb. It's similar to how IE used
> to not need *ego: with a verb, because it was sufficient to
> convey 1ps without (via the verb), yet now /I/ has become
> a necessary feature of English (at least standard English, anyway).

Don't know about the last claim.

At this point I would remind you of the hypothesis that *es started
as a resumptive pronoun - 'Wolf, he hungry'. The Melanesian Pidgin
English copula i- immediately comes to mind.

As you are fond of asking, do you have any examples of the semantic
change 'there is' to 'is'? Do we have a Hebaicist who can advise
whether Hebrew _ye:sh_ 'there is' (presumably an alleged cognate of
_is_) can serve as the copula?

Richard.