Re: The 'have' of possession

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