1194: to be (again) Mar 17, 2018

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As has been mentioned here before, the verb 'to be' is irregular, but this is in part because its conjugational forms come from 3 or 4 different origins. Indeed, many of the words that gave rise to the forms of 'to be' today were irregular in its own right. 'Am' and 'is' come from an older Indo-European (IE) root that is shared with the the corresponding versions of Latin for 'to be', i.e. 'sum' and 'est'. Not all of the words that gave rise to the current conjugational forms meant 'to be' always, such as the root of 'was' and 'were' which came from an IE root meaning ‘remain’. The forms 'be' and 'been' also come from an IE root, but it is less obvious at first glance; they are related to the Latin 'fui' meaning 'become' and Greek 'phuein' meaning 'bring forth'. This sort of relationship between [b] and [p], and also [f], are quite common across languages in the same family because they are quite phonetically similar.

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