To be or not to be

After yesterday's lesson, there was much confusion about a verb as simple and basic as 'to be'. Hopefully, this post makes things a bit clearer.

To begin, let's make a clear distinction between two meanings of 'to be':

The auxiliary verb or copula 'to be'. You use this word to say that two properties belong to the same thing.

For example, in 'John is a doctor', you say that the thing that has the property of being named John, also has the property of being a doctor. In 'The book is blue', you say that the thing that is a book is also a thing that is blue.

In short, the stuff on both sides of 'is' refers to the same entity. This is different from a verb like, say, 'punch': In 'Jim punched a doctor', 'Jim' and 'a doctor' are very clearly two different things.

This sense of 'to be' is expressed by the Japanese です.

The existence verb 'to be'. You use this word to say that a certain thing exists. Often, you also say something more about the thing, such as where it exists.

For example, in 'The cat is in the room', you can replace 'is' with 'exists' to create an equivalent, if slightly odd-sounding, sentence. (Compare 'Jim exists a doctor', which is plain wrong.)

This sense of 'is' is also often found with there: 'There's a book that explains this' means 'There exists a book that explains this' or 'A book exists that explains this.'

This sense of 'to be' is expressed by the Japanese ある (for things without a heart) or いる (for things with a heart: animals and people).

Confusingly, ある is also used to mean 'to have'. This sounds weird to us, but it's the product of the Japanese way of saying things in an impersonal way. So the sentence 私は本があります。literally means, 'As for me, there's a book', but what it actually means is 'I have/own a book'.

Fudeuchi-sensei also made a complex diagram showing all the forms of です; I'm reproducing it here in (hopefully) a simpler form.

Tense:	Plain form	Polite form
present positive (is)	だ	です
past positive (was)	だった	でした
present negative (isn't)	ではない	ではありません
past negative (wasn't)	ではなかった	ではありませんでした

In this table, the positive forms seem pretty straightforward: a plain past ending in -ta, a -su ending turning into -shita: this is all similar to a normal verb like たべる (if a bit more irregular).

But the negative forms look decidedly odd: they actually consist of a number of parts:

• で, which we learned is the -te form of です;
• は, which is the particle 'wa', as we can tell from the difference between the character and the pronunciation;
• a form of the verb ある that corresponds to the tense (e.g. ない is the plain present negative of ある, so the plain present negative of です is ではない) .

If you remember this as a basic rule (で＋は＋form of ある), the negative forms are already easier to remember.

As for the literal meaning, that's a bit harder (you can stop reading now if you want ;). We haven't yet encountered the construction "-te form + は", so we don't really know what は means here.

What I think it means literally is something like 'As for (a case of) being X, it doesn't exist' or 'There's no instance of being X'.

For example, これは本ではない breaks down as "this[topic] book be[topic] exist[plain neg]" which you could literally translate as "As for this, it being a book doesn't exist." or "As for this, there's no case of it being a book." which ultimately means, "This isn't a book".