History of the Russian verb 'to be'

[Steven Clancy]

I suppose this one is for me, since my graduate research was on the
concepts BE and HAVE in Russian, Czech, Polish, and Bulgarian. I'm
currently preparing the book manuscript, but for the time being, I'd be
happy to answer questions through email and if anyone is interested, I
have a PDF file of the dissertation.

Clancy, Steven J. 2000. _The Chain of BEING and HAVING in
Slavic_. Ph.D. Dissertation University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

To answer the questions:
This is all rather complicated, maybe it would be better off-list for
details, but I'll give brief explanations here.

1) Why did _est'_ survive and not the other forms?
It is possible that Russian always preferred to express 'be' in most
senses (in the present tense, anyway) without any expressed verb
'be'. This zero copula is widely prevalent in the languages of the world
and is found in ancient Indo-European languages. There was a full
conjugation of 'be' in the present as we know from OCS and other
Slavic languages, but it is possible that the use of these forms
was always literary and associated with Church Slavonic influences
on Russian. Jakobson in "Les enclitiques slaves" suggests that the forms
of 'be' had become clitics in Russian and were lost as were other clitics
in Russian (these forms of 'be', the short personal pronoun forms, and
note the suffixation of sja/s' to the verb). One must keep in mind that
the past tense in the L-participle was originally L-participle +
be-auxiliary. These forms are clitics today in Czech (compare these same
forms as main verb 'be' are not clitics) and have been phonetically
reduced and grammaticalized in Polish (details are too complicated to list
here, but quite interesting). It seems that early on the 3rd sg (and
sometimes pl) forms of 'be' took on special emphatic meanings (see
H. Andersen "From Auxiliary to Desinence"), which we see in the
specialized functions of Russ _est'_ in the HAVE construction,
presence/absence constructions, partitive constructions, and in vestigial
copula constructions. This emphatic meaning also developed in Polish,
which then subsequently rebuilt the conjugation of 'be' with the form Pol
_jest_ plus the phonetically reduced enclitic forms of 'be', Pol jestem,
jestes`, etc.

2) When did the forms of 'be' disappear? Let's just say in the Old Russian
period, but maybe the presence of these forms in the written tradition is
always influenced by Church Slavonic literary tradition and may not
reflect Russian as it was spoken.

3) Where are these forms found and can you trace their loss? You'll find
these forms in Old Russian texts, but due to the literary influence of
Church Slavonic on Russian, it is difficult to separate what was a writing
convention from what was living Russian at the time. You can still find
these forms today as full verbs 'be', where they have a biblical flavor in
Russian: e.g., U menja est' korni i est' rozhki, znachit, ja esm'.

4) Why is Russian so different from the other Slavic languages? This is a
BIG question! Well, we can say that the use of zero copula was an older
feature of Slavic and that Russian, as a marginal language in the Slavic
world (i.e., way out in the east on it's own, so to speak), that it
preseved this older expression of 'be', whereas the more centrally located
Slavic languages mutually influenced each other to develop an expressed
verb 'be'. Or we could say that both possibilities, expressed verb 'be'
and zero verb, were possible and that Russian chose one path and the rest
of Slavic the other. Or we can also say that since Russian was on the
eastern boundaries of Slavic and Indo-European in that part of Europe
anyway, and that Russian came under the influence of Finno-Ugric languages
which also have zero forms of 'be', whereas other Slavic was influenced by
other European langauges which had expressed forms of 'be'.

There's more to the story than this, so feel free to send email if you'd
like to.

Steven Clancy

Steven Clancy
University of Chicago
Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
1130 East 59th Street, Foster 406
Chicago, IL 60637

Office: (773) 702-8567
in Gates-Blake 438
Department: (773) 702-8033
Fax: (773) 702-7030
sclancy at uchicago.edu

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