Lesson 7: Parts of Speech - The Copula
The copula -- more commonly known as the "being verb". This links the subject and predicate directly. If you haven't figured it out yet, the word I'm talking about is... "be".
Unlike every other verb--where if you have a pronoun (the only declined word group in English) as the object, it takes the accusative case--the copula does not; instead it remains in the nominative case. Also, it is not a "direct object", per se. A few examples to assist with this concept:
Blue is he. (same meaning as "He is blue."
wink
Contrast this with using another verb while still having the third person masculine pronoun as an "object":
She painted him blue. ("She painted he blue" would be incorrect.)
This, of course, allows for the loose structure you got above, with "Blue is he"/"He is blue". If you were to say "He painted her blue", the meaning would be clearly different.
The copula also has the privilege of being one of the most bizarrely conjugated verbs in English. It is as follows:
Present
| Singular | Plural |
-----+----------+--------+
1st | I am | We are |
2nd | You are |You are |
3rd | He is |They are|
-----+----------+--------+
Past
| Singular | Plural |
-----+----------+---------+
1st | I was |We were |
2nd | You were |You were |
3rd | He was |They were|
-----+----------+---------+
Future
| Singular | Plural |
-----+------------+------------+
1st | I will be | We will be |
2nd |You will be |You will be |
3rd | He will be |They will be|
-----+------------+------------+
Present Perfect
| Singular | Plural |
-----+--------------+--------------+
1st | I have been | We have been |
2nd |You have been |You have been |
3rd | He has been |They have been|
-----+--------------+--------------+
Past Perfect
| Singular | Plural |
-----+--------------+--------------+
1st | I had been | We had been |
2nd |You had been |You had been |
3rd | He had been |They had been |
-----+--------------+--------------+
Future Perfect
| Singular | Plural |
-----+-------------------+--------------------+
1st | I will have been | We will have been |
2nd |You will have been | You will have been |
3rd | He will have been |They will have been |
-----+-------------------+--------------------+
As you can see, it is quite the pain in the a**. It personally makes me wonder how anybody can learn English.
