The concept of 'having' is expressed in a number of different ways in the world's languages, and can be used for a variety of purposes. For example, French, talks of 'having' hunger or thirst, where English can use these directly as verbs but more commonly as adjectives connected to their referent by the verb 'to be'. Verbs for having can be standalone and have no apparent other meaning, like the English 'have' or the French 'avoir', or show an obvious affinity for a word meaning to hold, as in Spanish 'tener'. The concept can even be difficult to express directly and be handled mosly by periphrasis, as in Irish. This article looks at the various sense of 'having' and describes how they work in Common.

This article has to do with statements that are primarily concerned with introducing information about possession. This focus contrasts with the attached article on possession that is more about introducing possession as a piece of clarifying information about some noun in a sentence that is otherwise concerned about something else entirely. In other words, this article is concerned with things like the English verb 'to have', and that article is concerned more about words like 'my' and English apostrophe-s constructions.

The Development of Having in Common

The original Old Common language was simple in this regard compared to modern High Common but also more ambiguous. You could refer to possession using a word like 'sif' or periphrastically more or less however you felt like expressing or emphasizing the concept, and states of being were also ill-defined in terms of the language's approach, some calquing the English approach of using a copular expression with an adjective and others using special verbs. Over time, however, High and Low Common have evolved to be much more particular in these areas, developing sensitivity to matters such as the alienability of the possession and the agency of the possessor.

Physical Possession

Physical possession in Common depends on the alienability or inalienability of the thing possessed and the agency or inagency of the possessor. This category of having is agnostic about the sense of actual ownership. Statements of having like this are much more particular about alienability than with possessives that describe a noun that we discussed in the earlier article, which tolerate much more fuzziness.

Common has a verb 'sif', which appears to have been meant to be an abstract gender version of the word 'sef', grip or hand, and functions like 'have' or 'avoir' as a direct verb of having. However, it is more limited than its equivalents in English and French. Specifically, it can only be used for objects that can be possessed alienably, and can only refer to possessors with agency.

Alienability in Common can be a somewhat slippery concept. Here is a sense of what that means in Common:

Alienable possession (can use 'sif'):

• A vehicle
• A home
• Clothing
• Money
• A weapon
• Friends and lovers
• Other human non-blood relationships, such as your employee or your doctor or your boss.

Inalienable possession (cannot use 'sif'):

• Blood and adopted relations
• Parts of your own body, including hair
• Properties of the mind, such as feelings, thoughts and beliefs, and the mind itself
• A physical condition, such a sickness

Inalienable possession has to be expressed a different way, using the 'periphrastic possession' construction of Common. The periphrastic structure is used to describe colocation. This looks like:

[Thing possessed](ABS) se an e [Possessor](NOM)

Example:

Yz kuprus mury se an e wen.
Some(NDEF.ABS.PL) red/coppery hair stand(NP.IM) be at me(NOM)

'I have red hair.'

This actually reads like 'There is red hair at me', and is a little like how Gaelic works. Because of the case marking, you can front the topic like this:

E wen se an yz kuprus mury.

This division applies for possessors deemed to have agency. Agency can also be a slippery concept in terms of possessive constructions. The following examples of agents which can use the above divisions and non-agents who can't can help illustrate the difference:

Agents:

• People, with some exceptions
• Animals, when personifying them
• Robots and AIs, when personifying them
• Supernatural entities that are deemed to be like people, such as God.
• Fictional entities that are deemed to be like people, such as space aliens

Non-Agents:

• Buildings
• Physical objects
• Machines, unless they are very self-directed in a way that seems to mimic agency, and the speaker is personifying them
• Animals, when objectifying them
• People, when objectifying them, such as with slaves or other very low-class people - this is viciously dehumanising.

The key fact is that non-agents cannot possess alienably and must use the colocation construction. For example, you could say:

E na zom se an ar akin laske.

'The car has four doors.'

That would be like part-of-body type possession, and this would be the figure of speech used whether the car were an agent or a non-agent. You could not say:

*Ja zom te sif ar akin laske.

However, let's say you want to say the car has four people (in it), which would normally be alienable possession. You could not say:

*Ja zom te sif ar akin atuin.

You would have to say:

E na zom se an ar akin atuin.

In other words, there is no alienable/inalienable distinction for non-agents, and non-agents always use the colocation expression used for inalienable possession regardless of the actual alienability of possession.

It is important to get this right. If you inadvertently use the alienable form when talking about a non-agent as the possessor, it's just amusing to Common speakers. But if you are talking about an agent as the possessor, and you inadvertently describe the possession using the colocation expression instead of 'sif', it is a grievous insult, as this is the way you might talk about a farm animal, or a slave if you really wanted to strip them of their humanity.

Note that you absolutely can use the proper agentive form when talking about a lower class person and it will not be viewed unfavourably, as kindness is notionally considered a virtue, so we would not encourage you to use this dehumanising form in regards to anyone - but people sometimes do.

Explicit Ownership

There are a couple of ways to make ownership explicit in Common. One is to directly use the verb 'merit', which is a noxaj verb meaning to own. For example:

We nox merit ijy pikki.

'I own a cat.'

It is also possible to use an expression of having that ordinarily is agnostic about ownership and add the modifier 'meritys'. For example:

Je te meritys sif y pikki.

'I have a cat (that I own).'

States of Being

In many of the world's languages, the concept of having is used to express certain states of being, such as hunger or thirst. For example, in English where you might say 'I'm hungry', or 'I'm thirsty', in French you might say 'j'ai faim' or 'j'ai soif', essentially 'I have hunger' or 'I have thirst'.

Common uses neither the English nor the French strategy. Common doesn't use a 'have' or a copular construction at all for these ideas. Instead, Common makes such words into intransitive pali verbs meaning to be in such-and-such a state. So you would have 'we se tocu' or 'we se sawyn', essentially, 'I hunger' and 'I thirst'.

As with English, there are other ways to express the same idea that aren't as idiomatic but do make sense. If a 'having' metaphor is used for something like hunger, treating it like a physical state you can possess like a sickness rather than something you do experientially, you would treat it as inalienable possiession, so the periphrastic idiom. You could say 'E wen se an a tocu', 'I have hunger' or 'hunger is at me', but not 'Je te sif a tocu', more or less 'I hold hunger in my possession'.

Age

To express the age of a person or object, in English you would say something like 'the boy is ten years old', using the verb 'to be', or in French you would say 'le garçon a dix ans', using the verb 'avoir', 'to have'. Common uses a different idiom than either of these - it uses a version of colocation possession but with the preposition 'rokíle', 'behind'. Common thinks of the past as being at your back, much as in English, so in Common, being an age is having the time behind you. Example:

Yr naw hulaz se an rokíle na pocuk.

'The child is ten years old.'

Notice that the time is referred to indefinitely. It is almost always the case that time periods are referred to with the indefinite in Common. This construction is identical for animate versus inanimate objects:

Yr naw-suz hulaz se an rokíle na zom.

'The car is fifteen years old.'