Thanks for the cross-cultural analysis of "to be" and "to stand." I
could stretch out the connotations of ESSERE and STARE. When I use STARE, and
its conjugations I am processing something like, "He STAYS at home," meaning
that he now STANDS, IS LOCATED is located. I am not sure that this is exactly
the construction which a native Italian speaker would use!! But I take STARE
to mean something like a transient state (notice that STATE is derived from the
same root as STARE!!).
So when you want to say something about HIM/HER, such as "He IS calm,"
might it work to bend the English around a bit and say, "He STANDS as calm?"
Again, the point of all this STANDS as this: Our very language forces
a formist ontology on our world view. This proves particularly troublesome to
psychologists (those who tell stories about human behaving), because we so
easily fall into the language patterns and begin to speak of persons BEING XXX
or YYY, rather than speaking of the person construing his/her self as XXX or
YYY and then enacting a role to attempt to get confirmation of the validity
of such construing and the concommitant enacting.
Jim Mancuso
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