English speakers might take it for granted that, when it comes to possessing something, either you own whatever it is or you don’t: “That’s my book, not yours.”
But the fact is that we take this for granted only because we are speakers of English, and our way of looking at the world is influenced by our native language. An examination of other languages from around the world shows us that ownership can be signalled in rather more complicated – and indeed more interesting – ways.
English speakers would not normally consider the relationships described in phrases such as my father or my arm, on the one hand, and my car or my book, on the other hand, as being significantly different from one another; but it is obvious when you think about it that the possessive pronoun my signifies rather different things in the two cases. My car belongs to me in the sense that I have probably bought it and hold documents proving my ownership, but tomorrow I could sell it and then it would belong to someone else. That is not something that would ever happen in normal circumstances with my father or my arm.
Analyses of different languages can shed very useful light on societal differences in human thought processes and social relationships. For example, speakers of a variety of languages across the world are obliged to make a grammatical distinction between alienable possession and inalienable possession. If an item is alienable, it can easily be dissociated from its possessor, so this category applies to temporary or transferable items like a car or book. On the other hand, inalienable possession applies to inherent or permanent relationships, like that of a person to their arm or their father.
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Weybourne Hope, the guardian of England
Many languages make this distinction by using different affixes for alienable and inalienable possession. A well-known example comes from one of the native American languages of Florida, Mikasuki, a member of the Muskogean language family and related to Choctaw. In Mikasuki, the word akni basically means “flesh”; but if you add the alienable possession marker am to it, the meaning of am-akni becomes “my meat” [which I am going to eat], whereas if you add the inalienable possession marker ač to the word, ač-akni means “my body”.
In other languages, alienable and inalienable possession can require different grammatical constructions. In Spanish, Lavo mi coche is literally “I wash my car”, but “I wash my face” is Me lavo la cara, literally “to me I wash the face”. These constructions differ in several details because there is a relationship of inalienability between my and face – it could not become someone else’s face – which is not the case with a car.
The West Papuan language Abun (also known as Yimbun, Anden, Manif, and Karon Pantai) belongs to the Papuan group of languages and is spoken by about 3,000 Abun people who inhabit the northern coast of the Bird’s Head Peninsula of north-western Papua New Guinea.
In this language, alienable possession is characterised by the presence of the linking form bi “of”, which is absent from the inalienable version: ji bi nggwe means “my garden”, literally “me-of-garden”, while ji syim means “my arm”, literally “me arm”. Obviously, the way in which a garden belongs to the speaker is significantly different from the way an arm belongs.
Coach
The Spanish word coche “car” has the same origin as English coach. Both words come ultimately from Hungarian, where kocsi was an abbreviation of kocsi szeker “(carriage) of Kocs”, a village about 40 miles north-west of Budapest where vehicles of this type were first made.
