The verb 'to be' is highly irregular in many languages. Why could this be?

Answer 1

As languages change over time, a particular change will rarely affect 100% of everything that can change. The places that a change does not affect are the most commonly used places in the language. Thus the most common verbs tend to accumulate these leftovers from the past. The verb "be" in European languages is just such a place where old patterns hang around.

For example, in the Germanic languages there was a rule about 2500 years ago that a "z" sound between two vowels in front of a stressed syllable became "r". This rule then stopped working. 99% of the places where the rule used to work went back to "z" and never changed to "r" again. But guess where the "z" still changes to "r"? "was" becomes "were" in English. About 6000 years ago, the Indo-European first person singular suffix on verbs was -m. This is still true in Sanskrit (bharami is "I bear"). In most Indo-European languages, this -m changed into a rounded vowel (Ukrainian beru "I bear", Latin fero "I bear", Greek phairo "I bear", etc.). Guess where the -m can still be found? Latin sum "I am", Greek eimi "I am", English I am. So the most common verb in the languages becomes the place where the oldest rules in the language still operate, sometimes the only place where the rule still operates.

In English, this is especially true since the modern conjugation of the verb "be" is actually the pattern for two different verbs in Old English times combined into one. In Old English, the verbs beon and weron both meant "to be" and you could choose which one you used in some cases and in other cases you had to use one or the other. In Modern English, we use the conjugation of beon for the present tense and the conjugation of weron for the past tense. The conjugation of beon itself shows the collapse of two even older verbs--one meaning "be" (the forms with a-) and one meaning "stand" (the forms with is-).

Answer 2

there is an exciting communicate of this in Steven Pinker's words and policies. He potential that each and all and sundry morphological differences in a language are concern to 2 pressures: on the single hand, we'd like the climate of a verb to be commonly used, so as that we are able to anticipate them with a minimum of concept or understanding; yet we additionally elect the climate of a verb to be diverse, so as that we will not confuse them (optimum distinctness will commonly bring about optimum irregularity). Following this argument, Pinker potential that the normally used a verb is, the lots greater probably it rather is to be odd (once you utilize a verb each and all of the time you infrequently could remember or anticipate the way it somewhat is going to behave). it rather is real in basically approximately all organic languages.

Answer 3

I have wondered about things like this as well. My guess is that, since it's more frequent, the irregular patterns are very well reinforced and therefore do not regularize as quickly from generation to generation as other verbs.

Answer 4

Irregularity occurs in the most commonly-used words in a language. Words which are used less are more likely to be regularised. Regularisation occurs through people following a set of grammar rules in their head to say words that they have never said before. This is why you hear children saying things like "go-ed" instead of "went" - they know the word "go" but want to say it in the past, so they use the past tense rule.

Answer 5

I would imagine that about 200ky BP early humans, like chimpanzees simply associated certain sounds with things (nouns). Hand in hand with the development of human culture would develop the need for 'doing' words. This would not only allow communication of introspective predictive behaviour, but also allow transmission of acquired cultural skills to the next generation. I would imagine primitive verbs like 'to be','to have' or 'to go' would have developed of necessity early on when there was no developed syntax for regular conjugation and distinctly separate forms were used in the tense and case.

Answer 6

Well not in Esperanto. Just one word to learn for 'to be' (esti) and one for each tense (estas, estis, estos, estus, estu, i.e. present, past, future, conditional, imperative with stress on first syllable each time). Why do so many people ignore the potential of this language? All the other verbs follow the exact same pattern!

Answer 7

taivo has given you a good start on an answer to this, but in fact steven pinker's book 'words and rules' deals with precisely this issue in depth.

an exhaustive answer to your question really does say a lot about how languages work (and even what a language is). but it does need a full book to answer such a question properly.

Answer 8

Most languages that conjugate verbs have irregular conjugations for the verb "to be" I think its is because "to be" is so common it have more oppertunity to change, while verbs like to operate stay very regular.

Answer 9

In Romance languages, to be is separated in to be as "i am present" and to be as "a state of being" (as in, I am here and I am unwell.)

It could be that many other languages make this distinction, making it irregular to separate the meanings.

Answer 10

In Welsh it's

'rwyf i,
'rwyt ti
mae o/hi
'rydym ni
'rydych chi
maen't hwy.