To have or not to have

[pne]

I just read in this comment:

I'd write
mae ganddi hi for 'she has'
mae ganddo fo for 'he has'

and it struck me how similar it is to Maltese: jien għandi "I have", hu għandu "he has", hi għandha "she has". Purely by coincidence, of course, but still fun.

(And also how the construction works out: apparently, in Welsh, "I have" is literally "Is with me", and in Maltese, "I have" is also "(I) at-me" (with "is" understood, e.g. "at-me a table" = "at me, there is a table" = "I have a table"). Though AFAIK you can also treat it like a verb and, for example, put an optional subject pronoun in front, so you could have "jien għandi mejda", or literally "I at-me table".)

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

There are those linguists who argue that it is more than a coincidence, most notably Indo-Europeanist Theo Vennemann. He believes that the shared features are due to ancient linguistic contact between Celtic and Semitic, to what he refers to as an "Atlantic superstratum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_%28semitic%29_languages)". So far I'm not convinced, but then I haven't read the fullest elabourations of his arguments.

[noidd.livejournal.com]

Hmmm,

I would have said
"Mae stampau gyda fi".

NB: Not a Welsh speaker, but I did 4 years of it in School.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Meaning what? I don't know of any Welsh word stampau, though there is stampiau (plural of stamp "[postage] stamp").

For "I have a table", I would say Mae bwrdd 'da fi. But this is a colloquial southern way of phrasing this and I know northerners who would prefer Mae gen i fwrdd or Mae gynna i fwrdd.