In reply to:

i hadn't realized (duh!) that
i am
you/ are
he/she/it is

we are
they are
i have been
you have been
i was, she was, he was
we are being
they were
etc..
were all the ROOT same verb. i never put it together.

It's also interesting that the verb "to be" is irregular in nearly every language, primarily because it's so common in speech. It's a pain learning sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt, or eimi, ei, esti, esmen, este, and eisi - and it just recently struck me how equally annoying it must be for people learning English.

"It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years." -Tom Lehrer