Re: The 'have' of possession

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'.