this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
151 points (98.7% liked)

Ask Lemmy

27040 readers
1874 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 48 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Be, is, are, was, am, were, being, been... are all the same word.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Languages that conjugate every verb for every person:

[–] AbouBenAdhem 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Same with “go” and “went”.

[–] Lauchs 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

"To be" averbs, at least in romance languages usually have a bunch of different forms. "To have" usually too but English is a bit of an exception there.

[–] Lost_My_Mind 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] moistclump 2 points 3 months ago

Or not to have…

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

"To be" being highly irregular il a common feature of a lot of Indo-European languages. But there's worse. In Spanish, "ser" and "estar" both mean "to be", but have wildly different meanings and cannot be substituted for one another.

[–] viralJ 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

"be" is an irregular verb in all languages, so it's not unique to English. Bonus fun fact: Russian doesn't have the verb "to be".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, and I feel like it’s even more irregular in Russian than just not existing. It’s not used in present tense as a copula, so in most cases where you would expect it in English. However it absolutely exists – быть – and is used like normal verbs in both past and future tense.

For example: «я здесь» – “I am here” (same word order, but this sentence has no verb), but «я был здесь» – “I was here”

And in the cases where it is used in present tense, there is a single conjugation regardless of subject: есть (in contrast to all other verbs, I assume at least, which all have distinct conjugations for 1/2/3rd person singular/plural).

A simple example for this would probably be sentences with “there is”, affirming the existence of something, as in “there is a bathroom” – «ванная есть». Contrived example for sure but I can’t think of something better right now.

[–] Nibodhika 2 points 2 months ago

Was going to reply that, it's not that Russian doesn't have it, it just gets omitted in the most common form.

But also one interesting thing is that from the examples you gave I can know your gender, because the verb to be is gendered in the past in Russian, which is very unique, I don't know of any other language where verbs are gendered.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Not in Turkish. It is "olmak" but the actual "to be" as it is used in "I am, they were, etc." is, now unused "imek". it has become a suffix and it is completely regular. Just i + person suffix.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

And it has multiple meanings. "you are sick" can mean that you're currently sick but can also mean that you're a sick person. Other languages usually differentiate the verb in those two cases