Learn English – a reasonable definition for “is”? What is the rule for inserting it in a sentence

grammargrammatical-numberthird-person

I am learning a foreign language with the help of an excellent tutor who speaks enough English for me to be able to understand them. The deal is, essentially, I correct their English if they teach/correct Malaysian.

Today I got a bit stuck. They provided the following statement:

That not exactly correct

This is clearly understandable. The obvious response is:

That is not exactly correct

I'm struggling to explain why one is preferable to the other. Bearing in mind they have little-to-no understanding of esoteric grammar rules (same here, to be honest).

Google tells me it is the "third person singular of 'be'". Fantastic. What, exactly, does that mean? Also, how can I explain this using relatively simple English to a non-native speaker?

Any responses are very much appreciated, by myself as much as the ultimate recipient.

(And hell, if you want to pick holes in the grammar/vocabulary of this post, please do)

Aside: I have checked for questions related to this, but I'm sure you can appreciate that "is" is (oh the irony) a bloody difficult search query. A search query for "[is]" (questions tagged with "is") returns nothing, so again, please help 🙂

Best Answer

The honest answer — especially for those who have little to no understanding of esoteric grammar rules, but also for those who in fact do — is "there is no reason". It just so happens that English is made that way.

"That not exactly correct" is a perfectly grammatical construction in Russian (or East Slavic languages in general). There, a copula is usually optional, in many cases not an option at all, and in fact for all intents and purposes you could say the word "is" as such does not even exist. (I am exaggerating just a little, and a native speaker or a linguist will understand what I mean. For everyone else, some examples follow shortly, so bear with me.)

Now, there is no intrinsic reason for English to be this way and for Russian to be the other. The only reason is "because reasons". Of course that's a disappointing answer to provide, so you actually can try to drive that point home by pointing out that there are also other differences, in the very same sentence, to which your tutor apparently is not objecting. So it's a small step for him to also not object to this one and just accept it how it is.

For example, note that in Russian (I will just go ahead and use that one as an example), the word "correct" in the sentence at hand would have to agree in gender and number with the subject ("that"), while English does not even have such a thing as inflection of adjectives for gender or number.

  • "She is correct, it is correct, we are correct" in Russian would be "she correct[female ending], it correct[neuter ending], we correct[plural ending]".
  • "There is a car in the street" would be "On street car".
  • "It is cold outside" would be "Outside cold[neuter ending]".
  • "Today is my birthday" would be "At mine today birthday".
  • "There's something strange about this language" would be "With this language something strange" — where both language and this would be inflected for case, and for a case not just English, but indeed most languages have never heard of: Instrumentalis.

Note how all these examples must have an "is" in English, and must not have an "is" in Russian. From there, it's a tiny step to accept the "that not correct" vs. "that is not correct" discrepancy, as it is indeed the norm and not an exception.

And the reason, again, is pure chance. There is no universal rule that every language must (not) use copulas, or genders, or cases, or aspects, or articles, or the dual number, or a future tense. Some do, others don't. And it took them millennia to develop that way, one tiny step at a time. You can't pin it down to one particular thing.

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