Suppletions for "to be"

[alice]

This is a thread for verbs and other words which have supplied suppletive forms of "to be" in various languages. To start with, in IE alone there are "to sit" and "to stand" in Italic, "to remain" in Germanic, and perhaps most oddly "to arise" in Old English. What others do you know of?

[Zju]

Isn't 'be' itself from PIE *bʰuH- 'to grow' with an intermediate sense of 'to become'?
Anyway, for a field day of content verbs grammaticalising into copulas, somebody could bring up Sino-Tibetan copulas.

[zompist]

Mandarin 是 shì 'be' was a demonstrative pronoun 'this' in Old Chinese.

There's also OC 为 wéi 'make' > 'function as ' > 'be'.

[Linguoboy]

For Japanese, the polite copula です desu is generally considered a contraction of であります de arimasu, where the first element is a locative particle and the latter is a verb of existence. But other contractions have been proposed, such as で‎ する de suru, with the light verb generally used to verbify nouns etc. The plain form だ da has some inflections supplied by the verb なる naru "reach".

[So Haleza Grise]

Australian languages sometimes use "sit" and "stand" in a similar way to "be". Bardi is one example. There is one language (unfortunately can't remember the name!) where the correct verb, for inanimates, depends on the shape and position of the object - it could be any of "stand" (for example a spear in the ground), "sit" or "crouch".

[alice]

Another is "Iba" in Spanish, for the imperfect, which has a converse in English "I've been to...".