Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Ross Clark Newsgroups: sci.lang Subject: Re: The 'have' of possession Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2024 21:03:09 +1200 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 45 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: r.clark@auckland.ac.nz MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2024 11:03:14 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="e8e9c639ca039025c0d702f62d34a7c8"; logging-data="2503035"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+R6UPt06hKO4mRia+8N582+WknWZSLGAE=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.9.1 Cancel-Lock: sha1:16MYk5fnPRQDWly6Vb3HdaX0n0Y= Content-Language: en-GB In-Reply-To: Bytes: 3245 On 30/04/2024 5:54 p.m., Peter Moylan wrote: > 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. But French, for example, also has a "to me" possessive construction, as in À qui est cette voiture? C'est à ma fille. Both types are quite widely distributed, not just in IE. And there are others. This has a good survey of types, with a link to a map: https://wals.info/chapter/117 Polynesian languages mostly don't have a "have" verb -- they say things like "my apple exists" -- but the one I have worked most on, which is an Outlier in Vanuatu, has borrowed a "have" verb from a neighbouring (non-Polynesian) language. "Have" verbs are rare in East Asia-Pacific, judging from the WALS map; but there it is. As for the Slavic-Celtic connection, I haven't heard of anything supporting it. Slavic has quite a lot of early borrowings from Iranian, and from Germanic, but I don't know of any from Celtic.