XPost: alt.usage.english

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.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW

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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.

I don’t have a neat explanation as to why both Russian and Irish have all the palatalisation you could want, though!

--
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)

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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.

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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

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Peter Moylan <[email protected]d> wrote:

I don't usually post to sci.lang, because I'm not a linguist,

(Though you don't imply it, I'll point out that the majority of the people
in sci.lang aren't linguists, and ,with the absence of the one that aueers
hold dearest, that percent has taken a hit.)

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.

This kind of independent development of the same feature in related groups, rather than its inheritance from the latest common ancestor, is in fact not rare, not only in language, but in biology too.

Some dinosaur groups independently developed beaks, which, although an
obvious adaptation, are not that common outside dinosaurs, even in groups similar to dinosaurs. The likely explanation is that the groundwork for
beaks was there in the earliest dinosaurs, as were the propitious internal dynamics of their genome, even if the beaks themselves weren't.

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On 2024-04-30, Peter Moylan <[email protected]d> 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."

So you might say that Celtic and Russian show the expected form of
predicative possession outside the influence of the Charlemagne
Sprachbund[1]. It is important to realize that extensive contact
has made the languages of Western Europe very similar to each other
in many respects and that many speakers of those languages, when
they think of foreign languages, only have other languages from
that close-knit group in mind.

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


[1] aka Standard Average European
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber [email protected]

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On 2024-04-30, Peter Moylan <[email protected]d> wrote:

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.

But that is only an orthographic convention. Apart from и/ы, the
vowels are pronounced the same. The distinction is between palatalized
and unpalatalized/velarized consonants.

The various Slavic languages have different sets of such consonant
pairs, and they might reflect different historical processes (I don't
know), but the languages, such as Russian, with a more extensive
system have developed it through the loss of the yers. The yers
were two extra-short vowels, one front, one back, and there must
have been allophonic palatalization before the front yer. Eventually
the yers were lost from all Slavic languages, becoming either full
vowels or dropping out altogether, leaving many places where the
palatalization was now the only distinction, rendering it phonemic.

Romanian is well into developing palatalized consonants, mainly in
word-final position, and the process appears to be allophonic
palatalization before final /i/ (still written) turning phonemic
with the loss of that vowel.

I have no idea how Irish developed its broad/slender distinction,
but a similar process would be my first guess.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber [email protected]

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On 01/05/24 00:37, jerryfriedman wrote:

Peter Moylan wrote:

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.

..

Does that mean you found out that it's the same in Hebrew? Yesh li
tapuach, there-is to-me apple.

Thanks for the extra example. I haven't yet looked at the map Ross
pointed to -- for some reason it won't display in my web browser, so
I've had to send the message to another computer -- but from the
accompanying text it's not surprising that Hebrew is in that group.

I started out thinking it was a European phenomenon, but in fact it
appears that Europe is the place where the dative possessive is dying out.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW

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On 30.04.2024 16:57, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

On 2024-04-30, Peter Moylan <[email protected]d> 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

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Le 30/04/2024 à 06:54, Peter Moylan a écrit :

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".

Cette pomme est à moi ?

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? [...]

Perhaps the explanation is that the 'have' of possession is a capitalist 'have'.

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On 02/05/24 22:50, Hibou wrote:

Le 30/04/2024 à 06:54, Peter Moylan a écrit :

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".

Cette pomme est à moi ?

Yes, I'd forgotten examples like that.

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? [...]

Perhaps the explanation is that the 'have' of possession is a
capitalist 'have'.

Thank you for that insight. That's the best explanation of all.

Peripherally related: we used to have a comedy group called The Doug
Anthony All-Stars, named after a former leader of the Country Party.
Their show on TV was called DAAS Kapital.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW

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