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From: Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org.invalid>
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english
Subject: Re: The 'have' of possession
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2024 20:24:29 +1000
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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