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From: Tim Lang <me@privacy.net>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: The 'have' of possession
Date: Wed, 1 May 2024 15:05:14 +0200
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On 30.04.2024 16:57, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

>On 2024-04-30, Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org.invalid> wrote:
> 
>>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?
> 
>Ross has already pointed to the World Atlas of Language Structures:
> 
>"As the map demonstrates, the distribution of the various types of
> predicative possession shows considerable areal effects. Eurasia
> and North Africa (with the exception of the languages of western
> Europe) is almost exclusively the domain of the Oblique Possessive."

[snip]

>Somewhere I've also read the suggestion that Russian might have
>been influenced by Finnic languages.

E. g. in Hungarian (Magyar) there ain't a word for "have" either.
Instead, some kind of wording {[to whom] + [to be]} is in use.

In most cases even without that pronoun meaning [to whom],
since the term for the possessed <item> always has itself
an _ending_, a suffix, to it which itself bears the possessive
semantic.

E.g.

►  "(Nekem) Türelmem van" <or> "Van (nekem) türelmem" (I've got
patience.)
►  "(Nekem) Pénzem volt/lesz" <or> "Volt/lesz (majd) (nekem) pénzem"
(I had & I'll have money.)
►  "(Nekem,) Ha pénzem lenne/volna" <or> "Ha lenne/volna pénzem
(nekem)" (If I had money.) and "lett volna <or> volt volna"
(If I would have had)

A bit complicated is the rendering of "the haves and the have-nots":

=> e.g. wordings meaning "the proprietors/owners and the lack-all"
or "the penniless". (Even Latin can't show a good rendering by
means of "habere": "the haves" are the ... "possidentes". (As
in "beati possidentes," the "beautiful haves" :-)).

Tim