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Is there any language which uses same verb in exactly same form in both "to be" and "to have", i.e. both "I am a dog" and "I have a dog" would be same sentence?
1) I doubt it, but there are many, many languages in which there is no verb "to have", and the possessor is expressed by a dative or dative-like case or prepositional object: "There is a dog to me" or "A dog is to me".
A reason to doubt the coincidence of the grammatical constructions for predication and possession is that this would engender too many ambiguities, as in the infamous 1939 quote from the Atlanta Journal, "the days at Tara Hall, when every man had/was a master and every man had/was a slave".[1] Turkic languages have an interesting construction for possession; in standard Turkish one says köpeğim var, literally "dog-mine there-is". This creates another ambiguity: the sentence Tanrım var, seninki yok can mean "My God exists, yours doesn't" as well as "I have a God, you don't". --Lambiam09:55, 15 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe a wild shot, but wasn't there an Indonesian pidgin of some shot, that had very lax rules both for grammatical syntax and word order, and hence often was ambiguous? I also thought about Toki Pona, but judging from the vocabulary, it might be a zero copula language(?), and it also had a rigid constituent word order. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 11:39, 15 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
A language with explicit case marking could conceivably have the same word for "to be" and "to have" without ambiguity: "I ham a dogNOM" would be "I am a dog" while "I ham a dogACC" would be "I have a dog". But I've never heard of a language where that was the case. —Mahāgaja · talk10:45, 16 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]
