Re: The 'have' of possession

Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org.invalid> 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.