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

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)

On 2024-04-30 07:40:41 +0000, Aidan Kehoe said:

> 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!

Something I find surprising is that although Spanish has separate
verbs, tener (to possess) and haber (to complete), Portuguese has just
one, but not the one one would expect, ter, fulfilling both roles.

--
Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 37 years; mainly
in England until 1987.

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

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.

Peter Moylan wrote:

> 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.
...

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

--
Jerry Friedman

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

On 2024-04-30, Peter Moylan <peter@pmoylan.org.invalid> 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 naddy@mips.inka.de

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

Peter Moylan suggested that ...
> 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?

Well, the Rus were Viking fur traders, you know. Moscow seems to have
originally been a fort to protect the trade route to Persia and Arabia.

> 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.

"By me" in English is sometimes used to indicate a possessive or
genitve relationship.

/dps "it's fine"

--
The presence of this syntax results from the fact that SQLite is really
a Tcl extension that has escaped into the wild.
<http://www.sqlite.org/lang_expr.html>

On 02/05/24 16:30, Snidely wrote:
> Peter Moylan suggested that ...

>> My question: does this suggest that the Slavs and the Celts were in
>> contact at a critical time of language evolution?
>
> Well, the Rus were Viking fur traders, you know. Moscow seems to have
> originally been a fort to protect the trade route to Persia and Arabia.

So they switched from a lightly inflected language to a heavily
inflected language? I feel sorry for them.

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

Peter Moylan wrote:

> So they switched from a lightly inflected language to a heavily
> inflected language? I feel sorry for them.

I believe that Old Norse was inflected, but heavily? I don't know.

--
Bertel
Kolt, Denmark

On 02/05/24 17:31, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
> Peter Moylan wrote:
>
>> So they switched from a lightly inflected language to a heavily
>> inflected language? I feel sorry for them.
>
> I believe that Old Norse was inflected, but heavily? I don't know.

Roughly as much as Old English, I believe. I think there were only about
four noun cases, which is not as bad as Russian.

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

On 2/05/2024 6:30 p.m., Snidely wrote:
> Peter Moylan suggested that ...
>> 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?
>
> Well, the Rus were Viking fur traders, you know.  Moscow seems to have
> originally been a fort to protect the trade route to Persia and Arabia.

To Byzantium, in the first instance. (Not much of a market for furs in
Arabia?)

>
>> 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.
>
> "By me" in English is sometimes used to indicate a possessive or genitve
> relationship.
>
> /dps "it's fine"
>

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'.

Peter Moylan wrote:

> On 02/05/24 17:31, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
>> Peter Moylan wrote:
>>
>>> So they switched from a lightly inflected language to a heavily
>>> inflected language? I feel sorry for them.
>>
>> I believe that Old Norse was inflected, but heavily? I don't know.

> Roughly as much as Old English, I believe. I think there were only about
> four noun cases, which is not as bad as Russian.

Yes, Wikipedia says it had nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative.

A few nouns had different genders in singular and plural, which is a nice
touch.

--
Jerry Fredman

On Thursday, Ross Clark yelped out that:
> On 2/05/2024 6:30 p.m., Snidely wrote:
>> Peter Moylan suggested that ...
>>> 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?
>>
>> Well, the Rus were Viking fur traders, you know.  Moscow seems to have
>> originally been a fort to protect the trade route to Persia and Arabia.
>
> To Byzantium, in the first instance. (Not much of a market for furs in
> Arabia?)

More likely slaves to the Islamic empire(s). Some from Britain and
Ireland.

>>> 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.
>>
>> "By me" in English is sometimes used to indicate a possessive or genitve
>> relationship.
>>
>> /dps "it's fine"
>>

^^^^ -d

--
"Inviting people to laugh with you while you are laughing at yourself
is a good thing to do, You may be a fool but you're the fool in
charge." -- Carl Reiner

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