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From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWhorter. I teach linguistics at Columbia University.

And after two interview episodes this week, I am going solo again.

And I'm going to do a subject a lot of you have requested the verb to be.

It's a neat topic, and yet it's one of those topics that almost never gets beyond the bounds of unreadable journals and textbooks.

And solving that problem is one of the main things that this podcast is for.

So let's go.

Now, one thing about this episode, I try to avoid dwelling too much

in foreign languages, because I've learned, especially over the past four or five years

from my books, that readers, even readers who like languages, get weary if you dwell too much on, especially languages beyond roughly French, Spanish, and German.

And I can completely understand that. But here, if we're going to talk to B, to really understand it, we have to address the world to an extent.

So I've got to do a little foreign. I'm going to need to do a little old English, which

might as well be German. I'll do my best to keep all of it as alive as I can, but especially

for the first about 10 minutes, we're going to have to travel a little bit. The first thing that

we might want to know about the verb to be from the perspective of English is how unnecessary it is. It's really

quite an accident. A cute title for this whole episode, hint, hint, Mike Wolo, might be the

incredible lightness of being. And that's because, really, if you're talking about a bread and

butter sentence like, I am your sister, where the verb to be is to indicate the equivalence between two things, between a subject and a predicate, then really it's very common for a language not to have any word for that and just to leave it to implication. It's about

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