Re: The 'have' of possession

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."

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                          naddy@mips.inka.de