Re: Prefixes and typology

Patrick Littell wrote:

> One feature of verb-initial languages that isn't well-known is that,
> according to some studies by Freeze and Georgopoulos, no verb-initial
> languages have the word "have".  Their studies are admittedly
> genetically and areally biased, focusing on Mayan and Austronesian, but
> their predictions seem to hold in general.  Of the top of my head,
> Breton has a "have" -- at least, there's a Breton word glossed as "have"
> -- but I don't really know any Breton so I don't know whether it's a
> counterexample.
Oops! Well, there's one now (Minza). Although the most usual way of
expressing "have" is with the locative case, Minza has a word "meri"
which is used when "have" means "to be in possession of (at the
moment)". But then, Minza is a VOS language, which is pretty weird to
begin with.

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