short man...") literally translates as "And he [particle] a short man...". The zero copula is especially common in Welsh poetry of the style. Amerindian languages Nahuatl, as well as some other Amerindian languages, has no copula. Instead of using a copula, it is possible to conjugate nouns or adjectives like verbs. Grammarians and other comparative linguists, however, do not consider this to constitute a zero copula but rather an affixal copula. Affixal copulae are not unique to Amerindian languages but can be found, for instance, in Korean and in the Eskimo languages. Many indigenous languages of South America do, however, have true zero copulae in which no overt free or bound morpheme is present when one noun is equated with another. In fact, zero-copula is likely to occur in third-person contexts in Southern Quechua (notice wasiqa hatunmi 'the house is big' vs. wasiqa hatunmi kan 'the house is big', where kan, the Quechua copula, is not really needed, as suggested by the first sentence). Yaghan, from Tierra del Fuego, used, in its heyday back in the mid-19th century, zero copula as one option, when introducing new participants in discourse, but had a slew of posture-based copular verbs for all other contexts. So I could say, kvnji-u:a Jon (lit. 'this man IS John'(zero copula). kvnji 'this', u:a 'man' (v here is schwa, and colon marks tenseness of the vowel preceding it), but once John has been introduced I might say, Jon lvpatvx-wvshta:gu:a mu:ta 'John is a woodworker', lvpatvx 'wood' (x voiceless velar fricative), wvshta:gu: 'work' u:a 'man', mu:ta irregular present tense form of mu:tu: 'to be (sitting) (or occupied doing)' Chinese Modern Standard Chinese, as well as many other Chinese dialects, uses a copula, such as the Mandarin word shì (是), before nouns in predications, like in Wŏ shì Zhōngguó rén (我是中国人 / I am Chinese), but not usually before verbs or adjectives. For example, saying Wǒ shì kāixīn (我是开心 / I am happy) is a grammatically incorrect sentence, but saying Wǒ kāixīn (我开心 / I happy), is correct. Adverbs can be added to the adjective, like in Wǒ hĕn kāixīn (我很开心 / I very happy). A copula may be used for adjectives, however, if the particle de (的) is added after the adjective, like in Wǒ shì kāixīn de (我是开心的). Vietnamese Somewhat similar to Chinese, the Vietnamese language requires the copula before nouns in predications but does not use a