Arbic copula

[Peter Trudgill]

Cypriot Greek has developed a present tense copula, presumably under
the influence of Greek, in which the copula appears to have developed
out of the personal pronouns:

li xmir énne kbar  'the donkeys are big'

Is this a very common type of diachronic development?
--
Prof. Peter Trudgill
Chair of English Linguistics
University of Fribourg
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1700 Fribourg
Switzerland

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