Re: Translation pattern of `to have'?

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> writes:

> I don't know, but another typical way of rendering "I have" is "to/at me is"
> which works as well with IE languages (Latin used esse+dative to render "to
> have") as with non-IE languages (Arabic does it that way, with nominal
> sentences in the present, so "I have a book"="to me a book").
Ah, Latin!  I should have known that...  Vage memories from
school... :-)

This seems a bit like Finnish or Russian, where it is something like
`on me (is) a book'.  In my current conlang, there are no (marked)
cases, so dative is not possible to use.  Only two slots (which you
could call cases, but they are marked by position only): agent and
patient.  Everything else has to be expressed with an (auxiliary)
verb.  I'd like to find a `good' auxiliary construction.  Actually, I
don't know how.

One problem (seems to be frequent in active languages) is: no-one
acts.  `A has B' seems to have a similar structure as `A loves B', but
to speak of an experiencer in the first sentence in order to justify
agentive slot (or case) for A (as in the second sentence) still seems
overinterpreting.  Maybe not.  I don't know.  So I don't know how to
find a good verb here.

But anyway, I do have a verb for locative, maybe that is usable like
in Finnish (which uses adessesive case):
  Kadulla on yksi auto.   - There's a car on the street.
  Minulla on yksi auto.   - I have a car.
(Is this right?)

BTW, my first conlang Fukhian uses genitive `my book <fullstop>' with
normal copula to express possessive.  Dative is used for `to give'.

Hmm.  Still thinking.

**Henrik

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