Indo-European copula copula (with corresponding voiceless and voiced fricatives) existed side by side in Germanic, and the involvement of a separate root "" is unnecessary. The root "*(s)teh-" meant "to stand". From this root comes the present stem of the so-called "substantive verb" in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, "tá" and "tha" respectively. On the absence of the initial s- in Celtic, see Indo-European s-mobile. In Latin, "stō, stare" retained the meaning "to stand", until local forms of Vulgar Latin began to use it as a copula in certain circumstances. Today, this survives in that several Romance languages (Galician-Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan) use it
Etymology of Scotland proportion of the Scottish population speak to a greater or lesser degree. The Scots- and Irish-Gaelic name for Scotland, Alba, derives from the same Celtic root as the name Albion, which properly designates the entire island of Great Britain but, by implication as used by foreigners, sometimes the country of England, Scotland's southern neighbour which covers the largest portion of the island of Britain. The term arguably derives from an early Indo-European word meaning 'white', generally held to refer to the cliffs of white chalk around the English town of Dover, ironically located at the furthest end of Great Britain