XPost: alt.usage.english   
   From: naddy@mips.inka.de   
      
   On 2024-04-30, Peter Moylan  wrote:   
      
   > This bothers me. What should (most) Celtic languages and (some) Slavic   
   > languages share a feature that is not found in the many languages that   
   > sit geographically between them?   
      
   Ross has already pointed to the World Atlas of Language Structures:   
      
   "As the map demonstrates, the distribution of the various types of   
   predicative possession shows considerable areal effects. Eurasia   
   and North Africa (with the exception of the languages of western   
   Europe) is almost exclusively the domain of the Oblique Possessive."   
      
   So you might say that Celtic and Russian show the expected form of   
   predicative possession outside the influence of the Charlemagne   
   Sprachbund[1].  It is important to realize that extensive contact   
   has made the languages of Western Europe very similar to each other   
   in many respects and that many speakers of those languages, when   
   they think of foreign languages, only have other languages from   
   that close-knit group in mind.   
      
   Somewhere I've also read the suggestion that Russian might have   
   been influenced by Finnic languages.   
      
      
   [1] aka Standard Average European   
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Average_European   
   --   
   Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)