Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 November 14

= November 14 =

Two questions

 * 1) Is there any language which uses same verb in exactly same form in both "to be" and "to have", i.e. both "I am a dog" and "I have a dog" would be same sentence?
 * 2) Is there any language which does not have any adpositions? --40bus (talk) 20:27, 14 November 2022 (UTC)


 * 1) I doubt it, but there are many, many languages in which there is no verb "to have", and the possessor is expressed by a dative or dative-like case or prepositional object: "There is a dog to me" or "A dog is to me".
 * 2) According to Bernard Comrie's "Language Universals and Linguistic Typology" (2nd. edition), "Most Australian languages have neither prepositions nor postpositions". AnonMoos (talk) 20:35, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
 * A reason to doubt the coincidence of the grammatical constructions for predication and possession is that this would engender too many ambiguities, as in the infamous 1939 quote from the Atlanta Journal, "the days at Tara Hall, when every man had/was a master and every man had/was a slave". Turkic languages have an interesting construction for possession; in standard Turkish one says köpeğim var, literally "dog-mine there-is". This creates another ambiguity: the sentence Tanrım var, seninki yok can mean "My God exists, yours doesn't" as well as "I have a God, you don't". --Lambiam 09:55, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Maybe a wild shot, but wasn't there an Indonesian pidgin of some shot, that had very lax rules both for grammatical syntax and word order, and hence often was ambiguous? I also thought about Toki Pona, but judging from the vocabulary, it might be a zero copula language(?), and it also had a rigid constituent word order. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:39, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
 * A language with explicit case marking could conceivably have the same word for "to be" and "to have" without ambiguity: "I ham a dog$undefined$" would be "I am a dog" while "I ham a dog$undefined$" would be "I have a dog". But I've never heard of a language where that was the case. —Mahāgaja · talk 10:45, 16 November 2022 (UTC)