vonPeterhof wrote:This sort of reminded me of the shock I felt going from Biblical to Modern Hebrew, which still uses יש ל (roughly "there is at") as the default structure marking possession, but for definite nouns it also obligatorily adds the direct object marker, resulting in sentences like יש לי את הספר which reads like 私に本をある to my brain (especially since my native Russian also uses the "(there is) at me" possessive structure). This feels like transposing the paradigm of the verb "to have" onto יש most likely under the influence of the first languages of the first generation to revive Hebrew, like Yiddish, Polish, Judeo-Spanish and others.
Just as a bit of a follow-up on this, I got curious about this feature again after reading that the grammar of modern Hebrew is more similar to that of
Mishnaic Hebrew than Biblical. I started to doubt my initial conclusion that the feature I noted must have appeared in the modern age under Indo-European influence, so I decided to dig further, and what I found is that while this general idea is correct, it's apparently
a bit more complicated than just transposing the "to have" paradigm.