blue." || (the auxiliary verb is implied only); |- | | "I am blue." || (the auxiliary verb appears in .) |} The essential copula is possible in the third person singular: {| border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="1" | align=left | || align=right | || align=left | |- | | "[The] sea is (always, characteristically) blue." |} In Tatar, expresses doubt rather than a characteristic. The origin of is the verb , with a similar meaning to the Latin . In the modern Tatar language copula is a disappearing grammatical phenomenon and is only rarely used with the first and second person (while the third person copula has fallen completely out of use). In the past there was a full paradigm for all persons: {| border="0" cellspacing="5" cellpadding="1" | align=left | || align=right | || align=left | |- | | Singular || Plural |- | I person | -мын/-мен || -быз/-без |- | II person | -сың/-сең || -сыз/-сез |- | III person | -дыр/-дер (-тыр/тер) || -дыр/-дер (-тыр/тер) |} For example: (, "I'm a teacher"), (, "You're a teacher"), (, "He/She's a teacher"). While the copulas for the first and second person are historically derived from personal pronouns, the third person copula comes from the verb (, "stand, live, exist"). For negation the copula affix is attached to the negative particle (): (, "I'm not a writer"). The copula is only used with nouns. Sometimes the noun can be in the locative case: (, "You are at home"). Japanese In Japanese, the copula is not used with predicative adjectives, such as . It is sometimes omitted with predicative nouns and adjectival nouns in non-past tense, such as , but is necessary for marking past tense or negation, as in . It is also sometimes omitted in wh-questions, such as . Māori In Māori, the zero copula can be used in predicative expressions and with continuous verbs (many of which take a copulative verb in many Indo-European languages) — , literally "a big the house", "the house (is) big"; , literally "at (past locative particle) the table the book", "the book (was) on the table"; , literally "from England (s)he", "(s)he (is) from England"; , literally "at the (act of) eating I", "I (am) eating" Arabic In Arabic, a Semitic language, the use of the zero copula again depends on the context. In the present tense affirmative, when the subject is definite