Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
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: <v0qc4h$2ccbr$1@dont-email.me>
References: <v0q124$29skf$1@dont-email.me>
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: <v0q124$29skf$1@dont-email.me>
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.