“That is big.”). Singular present tense forms of the copulas in Nepali are shown in the table below: Iranic languages Persian With regard to the function of the verb ‘to be’ as a copula, the most conspicuous feature of Modern Persian language is the evolution of an existential be, hast (exists), out of ast (is). In fact, when studying the forms and functions of ‘to be’, one might find certain characteristics specific to Persian that is worth pondering upon— i.e. even without considering the diachronic evolution of Modern Persian language and its relation to Ancient Iranian languages (such as Old Persian and Avestan) whose usage of the verb ‘to be’ seems more close to Sanskrit. Paradoxically, despite the fact that Persian is apparently the only Indo-European language that has created an existential be out of the copula, it has simultaneously made an extreme use of the latter to produce a general paradigm for conjugating all Persian verbs. Historically speaking, like most of Indo-European languages that make use of suppletive roots to denote ‘to be’, Persian integrates Proto-Indo-European (PIE) verbs *h1es- (to be) and *bhuH (to grow> to become> to be). Hence, while Persian infinitive būdan (to be) < PIE *bhuH forms the past stem of the verb (e.g. Persian būd- ‘was’) or acts as an auxiliary verb in formation of pluperfect of other verbs, its present tense is solely based on the derivatives of PIE *h1es-. It is, in fact, from the declension of PIE *h1es- (to be) that six present stems have been created and assigned to the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person singular and plural to act as the present-tense conjugation of Persian būdan (to be), as shown in the following table. As an example, in the following sentences, the present forms of the verb 'to be' are used as copulas or predicates: Furthermore, as endings added to the stem of the verbs, these declensional forms have been grammaticalized to shape a general paradigm for the grammatical conjugation of all other verbs; these endings were once auxiliary verbs which evolved into an enclitic. This generalized conjugational paradigm is also applied to the past tense of the verb būdan (shown in the table below). However, what is linguistically notable, is the emergence of an existential be out of the copula, viz hast (exists) out of ast (is). The evolution of this exceptional form, might go back to ancient Iranian