2.4 Having and Existing — 有 / 没有 — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say that you have something, using 有 , and say that something exists with the same verb. Put a place first and the thing second, which is the order Chinese uses where English says "there is". Negate both with 没有 , and explain why the negator you have been using so far is the wrong one here. Say "nobody" without a special word for it. Prerequisites : 2.2 and 2.3, which gave you the negator 不 and 很 . This lesson takes away that negator in one place only, so it helps to have it firmly in hand first; read 2.3 Grammar again if it is not. Two English sentences: "I have a dog" and "there is a dog in the room". They look unrelated. The first is about possession and uses the verb have ; the second is about existence and uses a dummy subject, a form of be , and a preposition. English keeps them apart, and a learner of English has to acquire both. Chinese uses one verb for both, and the verb is 有 , said yǒu . That is a saving. The price is a piece of irregularity: 有 is the one common verb that is never negated with 不 . It takes 没 instead. This is one of the commonest beginner's errors, and it is worth learning as a fact about a single word rather than as a rule, because among the verbs met so far it applies to this one alone; the other use of 没 , with completed actions, comes in lesson 2.14. The pattern For possession, the shape is the one from lesson 2.1 with 有 in the verb slot: subject, then 有 , then the thing had. No article on the object, no ending anywhere, and no distinction between "have" and "has". Chinese English 我有钱。 [1] I have money. 我们有钱。 [2] We're rich. (Literally: We have money.) 我有时间。 [3] I've got time. 他有苹果。 [4] He has an apple. 他有很多书。 [5] He has a lot of books. 他有很多钱。 [6] He has a lot of money. Rows one and two are the same sentence with a different subject, and the corpus renders one as "I have money" and the other as "We're rich". That is a translator's judgement about what an English speaker would say, not a difference in the Chinese; keep an eye on this habit, because it will mislead you if you read translations as though they were glosses. What can fill the object slot is wide. Concrete things, as in rows four and five; abstractions, as in row three, where what is had is time; and family members, so that "I have two brothers" is built on the same pattern as "I have money", with a number and a measure word (lesson 2.8) in front of the noun. English have is wider than it looks, though, and two of its uses are not this verb at all. "I have eaten" is a tense, and "we had a good time" is an event rather than a possession. Neither takes 有 , and the second is said with a completely different verb. Rows five and six use 很多 , which is the 很 of the last lesson supporting the adjective 多 , "many". In front of a noun the same two characters mean "a lot of", and they do the work of English "many", "much" and "a lot of" without caring whether the noun is countable. English has to choose: "many books" but "much money". Chinese does not, and neither noun changes shape. The same verb for existing Now the other job. To say that something exists somewhere, name the place first, then 有 , then the thing. The place goes in the subject slot. There is nothing corresponding to English "there", and nothing corresponding to "is". Chinese English 这里有人。 [7] Somebody's in here. 有很多人。 [8] There were lots of people. 山上有个房子。 [9] There is a house on the hill. 音乐会上有很多人。 [10] There were lots of people at the concert. Sentence nine (the sentences are numbered through the lesson, as the small bracketed figures show) is the one to learn by heart, because its shape is the reverse of the English. The English begins with "there is" and ends with "on the hill"; the Chinese begins with the hill and ends with the house. Read the Chinese character by character and you get "hill-on has a house". The place comes first because it is the subject: Chinese is saying that the hill has a house on it. That explains something which otherwise looks like two unrelated uses of one verb. They are not two uses. Possession and existence are the same statement in Chinese, and the only difference is whether the thing in the subject slot is a person or a place. Once you see it that way, "the room has a person in it" and "I have a dog" are obviously the same construction, and the English pair stops being a useful model. Two details in that table. The location words 上 , "on, above", and 里 , "in, inside", come after the noun, not before it: 山上 is "hill-on" and 音乐会上 is "concert-on". (In the table 里 appears only inside 这里 "here"; after a noun it works the same way, as 家里 "home-in" does in the exercises.) English prepositions go in front of their noun and these go behind, which is the single most useful thing to know about Chinese place expressions, and lesson 2.11 takes it further. The other detail is the character 个 in row nine. It is a measure word, the kind of word that stands between a number and a noun; here it stands for "one" plus the measure word, with the "one" left unsaid. Measure words are lesson 2.8; for now read it and pass on. Sentence eight has no place in it at all. With nothing in the subject slot, 有 simply asserts existence, and the corpus supplies "there were" in English. Note again that the Chinese says nothing about the past. The negator that is not the usual one Everywhere else in this volume so far the negator is 不 . With 有 it is 没 , said méi , and the pair 没有 is what you will actually say and hear. The form an English speaker builds by rule is * 不有 , with an asterisk to mark that it does not occur, and it does not occur in standard Mandarin, in speech or in writing. Chinese English 我没有钱。 [11] I don't have money. 他没有钱。 [12] He has no money. 我没有狗。 [13] I don't have a dog. 没有水。 [14] There is no water. 没有人知道。 [15] No one knows. 还没有。 [16] Not yet. Sentence fifteen deserves attention. 没有人 is literally "not have person", and it does duty for English "nobody" and "no one". Chinese has no negative prono