Some Senses of is

Pope’s hesitation certainly would have been in place with the uses of is. Any attempt to sketch their plan (if there is one) suffers from having to use is itself in the plan, or, at the cost of painful grammatical contortions, to use words – ‘has’, ‘does’, ‘existence’, ‘ascribes’, ‘attributes’, ‘connects’, ‘relates’, and so on – which themselves reproduce, in their own multiplicity and with their own variants, portions of the maze. Yet no one who looks beyond his momentary embarrassments will blame is for its changeableness, its adaptiveness, its occasional obstinacy or its trick of suddenly sometimes disowning all responsibility. It is the servant, the all-but inexhaustibly resourceful servant, of a number of masters who by no means coincide in their demands. If language in general does not work well enough there are still cases in which it works too well. But the very difficulties that is creates in meeting all demands are among its best contributions to civilization. We have only to compare the work it does and the way it sometimes goes on strike, with the behaviour of the agents which take over some of the same functions in other languages, to appreciate is more justly. Here, for example, is Mr Arthur Waley’s account of the doings of yeh, in ancient Chinese. (The Way and its Power, p. 63.) 318

In all languages it is the smallest and most innocent-looking words which have given rise to the most trouble. A large number of the tangles in which European thinkers have involved themselves have been due to the fact that the verb ‘to be’ means a great many different things. The fact that Chinese lacks anything exactly corresponding to the verb ‘to be’ might at first sight seem to put Chinese logicians at an initial advantage. But this is far from being the case. Chinese assertions take the form ‘commence begin indeed’, i.e. ‘To commence is to begin’. And this pattern of words, attended upon by the harmless-looking particle yeh, ‘indeed’, has caused by its reticence far more trouble than any Western copulative by its assertiveness. Some of the things that this simple pattern can express are as follows: (1) Identity, as in the example given above; (2) that A is a member of a larger class, B. For example ‘Boat wooden-thing indeed’, i.e. ‘boats are made of wood’; (3) that A has a quality B. For example ‘Tail long indeed’, i.e. ‘its tail is long’. ¹ If words have a fixed connection with realities, the Chinese argued, yeh (‘indeed’) ought always to mean the same thing. If for example it implies identity, one ought to be able to travel hundreds of leagues on any ‘wooden-thing’; but in point of fact one can only travel on a boat. 319