The Concept of Is

I realized one of the greatest technologies that I take for granted in the US is a highly developed language. Creole is, by definition, a fully formed language born from multiple parent languages. Haitian Creole is born from French and native African tribal languages. The French influence is quite clear when you hear certain adjectives and nouns, but the structure is foreign to French; for instance verbs are not conjugated to indicate tense, rather a “te” or “pral” is put before the word to indicate if it happened in the past or future.

One of the interesting aspects of Haitian Creole is that there is no verb that means, “to be”; there is no word in Haitian Creole words that translates directly to “is”. This makes for direct translations to sound a little like cave man speech, “Kijan our rele?” directly translated means “what you called?”, but conveys the idea “what is your name?”. For me, this makes learning the language much easier because I don’t have to learn the creole for “am”, “is”, “will”, etc.,  but it poses an interesting issue linguistic development of Haitian culture.

Today when I was teaching a few students in English, one student rather sheepishly asked me, “what do I like in life?” and I responded, “I like being in Haiti”. I like to be in Haiti. He gave me a confused look, so I repeated myself, trying to speak a little slower, but I realized that his confusion had nothing to do with my pronunciation; it was because he didn’t know the word “being”. Every time I speak with the Haitians they only use “is” or another form of the verb “to be” when they are using a phrase they’ve previously learned. I’ve had many conversations that start with “how are you”, “I am fine”, but then end up with “I like mason, so I take this class”. They are trying to say “I would like to become a mason, so I am taking this class. I first help explain to this student what I liked about Haiti by saying that I liked living in Haiti, which sort of worked, but wasn’t really what I was aiming to say. Living, or existing in Haiti is difficult, I can’t drink the water, my family and friends aren’t here. What I like about being in Haiti is being apart of the community. I said that I liked the work that I do, which is true, but that still didn’t get my point across. The reason I like my work as much as I do is because it helps those around me who I care about. I like my work because it means I am a contributing member of the community, it allows me to be present in Haiti.

             Not having the verb “is” was not too difficult up until this point. Before this, the verb “is” was just used to complete a thought. “He is doing good work”, and “He doing good work” have exactly the same meaning, one is just less sophisticated than the other. But now “is” is so much more than a simple verb, “is” is a state of being present. To be apart of a something, or to be present in a situation can’t really be expressed without “is”. The “is” idea can be substituted with “actively participate” or “attend”, but even these terms are much less descriptive the “is”. Who says that “I actively show pride for America”, no one, the idea is always expressed as “I am a prod American”. The act of being is something that can’t be fully explained without the word “to be”.

          This leads me to think about the affect Haitian Creole has had on Haitian Culture. How would my life be different if I had no tangible way to express “being” or “to be”? I have very little knowledge of linguistics or linguistic development, but I know that for myself, not having the term “to be” would not only restructure my speech but would restructure how I see the world. If language is the package in which we understand the world around, how is the Haitian world constructed differently without the idea of “being”