Indo-European copula: Encyclopedia II - Indo-European copula - The Proto-Indo-European roots

Indo-European copula - The Proto-Indo-European roots

Indo-European copula - *h₁es-

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

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

Indo-European copula - *b^huH-

The root *b^huH- (where H stands for a laryngeal of unknown quality) probably meant "to grow", but also "to become". This is the source of the English infinitive be and participle been (Germanic participles have the suffix in -an), as well as, for example, the Gaelic future tense bithidh. PIE /b^h/ becomes Latin /f/, hence the Latin future participle futūrus and perfect tense fuī; Latin fiō 'I become' is also from this root, as is the Greek verb φύω, from which physics and physical are derived. Jasanoff (2003: 112) reconstructs the present indicative of this verb as follows:

Indo-European copula - *wes-

The root *wes- may originally have meant "to live". The e-grade is present in the German participle gewesen, the o-grade (*wos-) survives in English and Old High German was, while the lengthened e-grade (*wēs-) gives us English were. (The Germanic forms with /r/ result from grammatischer Wechsel.) See West Germanic strong verb: Class 4.

Indo-European copula - *h₁er-

The root *h₁er- meant "to move". This is probably the origin of the Old Norse present stem, the second person forms of which were borrowed into English as art and are. Older authorities linked these forms with *h₁es- and assumed grammatischer Wechsel (/s/→/r/), which however would be difficult to explain in the present stem.

Indo-European copula - *steh₂-

The root *steh₂- survives in English with its original meaning: "to stand". From this root comes the present stem of the so-called "substantive verb" in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, tá and tha respectively. In Latin, stō, stare retained the meaning "to stand", until local forms of Vulgar Latin began to use it as a copula in certain circumstances. Today, this survives in that several Romance languages use it as one of their two copulae, and there is also a Romance tendency for a past participle derived from *steh₂- to replace that of the main copula.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Proto-Indo-European roots", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki