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: Re: The 'have' of possession Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2024 20:24:29 +1000 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 36 Message-ID: References: <87r0enjo1y.fsf@parhasard.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2024 12:24:34 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="a5b0a9229574516a50ed9aa081703646"; logging-data="2537827"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/oX2JRUv9ECOREzZxcTx8n" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (OS/2; Warp 4.5; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.8.0 Cancel-Lock: sha1:j6hJ/K82qBBJ66a0Nm9HNi7AE8o= In-Reply-To: <87r0enjo1y.fsf@parhasard.net> Bytes: 2623 On 30/04/24 17:40, Aidan Kehoe wrote: > Ar an triochadú lá de mí Aibreán, scríobh Peter Moylan: > >> [...] 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. > > That’s roughly what the consensus is, though. > > https://www.google.com/books?q=%22mihi+est%22+Indo-european > > Early Latin preferred the dative + sum construction, haber took over > with time. Note that Latin haber (and its Romance descendants) are > not related (beyond a likely Sprachbund effect) to English ‘to have’ > and its Germanic relatives. Similar dynamic with Greek, and I learn > today with Tocharian. Many thanks to both you and Ross. I didn't realise that it's a well-studied phenomenon, and that the "mihi est" form survived in Latin and Greek into relatively modern times. Nor did I know that it's found in language families all over the world. I guess, then, that the Russian-Irish connection boils down to saying that they're both conservative languages. > I don’t have a neat explanation as to why both Russian and Irish have > all the palatalisation you could want, though! In Russian it's clearer because of having, in effect, two sets of vowels. In Irish, I have not yet reached the point of being able to hear or produce the difference between broad and slender consonants, except in some obvious cases (s, mh, ch). -- Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org Newcastle, NSW