Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Peter Moylan Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english Subject: The 'have' of possession Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2024 15:54:10 +1000 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 30 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2024 07:54:13 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="a5b0a9229574516a50ed9aa081703646"; logging-data="2421391"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX195QzTvTrqz1ioN0Xr3iUxE" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; Warp 4.5; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.8.0 Cancel-Lock: sha1:YeoWZezH2l1pziOp+YiO75/NexA= X-Mozilla-News-Host: news://news.eternal-september.org:119 Bytes: 2318 I don't usually post to sci.lang, because I'm not a linguist, but this topic is one that needs expert input. I hope nobody minds the cross-post to the newsgroup I normally inhabit. Almost all European languages have a "have" verb to indicate possession. (And has other uses, but that's a separate topic.) The Irish language is an exception, in that it lets a preposition do the job of a verb. The equivalent of English "I have an apple" is "Tá úll agam", literally "Is apple at me". Scots Gaelic is similar (Tha ubhal agam), and so is Welsh (Mae gen i afal). And so is Russian. The Russian for "I have an apple" is "у меня есть яблоко", literally "at me is apple". Apart from word order, this is identical to the Irish example. This bothers me. What should (most) Celtic languages and (some) Slavic languages share a feature that is not found in the many languages that sit geographically between them? My question: does this suggest that the Slavs and the Celts were in contact at a critical time of language evolution? An alternative possibility, I suppose, is that this used to be a standard feature of IE, one that most of the successor languages eventually lost. But that sounds less likely to me. -- Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org Newcastle, NSW