I'm currently learning Spanish, and I've noticed something very strange. In English, we use the verb "to have" for both possessions and obligations. Compare "I have three fruits" versus "I have to do homework tonight".
In Spanish, the former usage translates as "to have" = "tener". But what's weird is, the latter usage ALSO translates as "to have to do X" = "tener que X".
Why would that be? I always thought that this alternate usage of "to have" in English was a strange idiosyncratic thing that had nothing to do with the word's first meaning, but apparently Spanish does it the exact same way. Do both usages derive from a parent language?
@aluaces That makes me wonder if French has something similar. Do you know? And/or does anyone reading this thread know?
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so Have basically has two forms as you point out, one being "to be in possession of" as in "I have a book" and the other is as a stand in for must "I have to go" is equivalent to "I must go".
The word have did not take on the additional meaning of "must" until middle english, in the 1500s. Prior to that the form would have been basically "I had better", specifically in old english "I had better go" would be "Ic wære betere betide"
Interestingly had-have-must all three words seem to have a lot of overlap as time goes on. they are all rooted in germanic and spanish is also rooted in germanic so likely both languages share all three words as a root in the germanic language.
@freemo Interesting! I don't yet know whether Spanish has anything like that, where the past tense of "tener" is used in a similar construction. I'll keep an eye out to see if there's a parallel there as well.
@sunny_qad Yea I know far less about spanish but its geographically close to england and the languages have very close germanic roots. It is likely the two influenced eachother.
@sunny_qad Maybe a reason is that both verbs are auxiliary, so they are special.
I will be likely wrong, but I have seen that many times those similarities between English and latin-derived languages come from the French influence over the first.