in Russian, "I have a friend" can be expressed by the sentence у меня есть друг u menya yest drug, which literally means "at me there is a friend". Latvian, Irish, Turkish and Uralic languages (such as Hungarian and Finnish) use an existential clause to assess a possession since the verb to have does not have that function in those languages. Japanese has the verb motsu meaning "to have" or "to hold", but in most circumstances, the existential verbs iru and aru are used instead (with the possessed as the verb's subject and the possessor as the sentence's topic: uchi wa imōto ga iru, "I have a younger sister", or more literally "as for my house, there is a younger sister"). For more examples, see . See also Genitive case Possessive adjective Possessive case Possessive pronoun Possessive suffix References Sources Heine, Bernd (1997) Possession: Cognitive sources, forces, and grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grammar Genitive construction Grammatical construction types