I'm a native English speaker that has been learning Mandarin.
The Mandarin equivalent to the English verb "to have" is "有". As far as I can tell these two words are a 1 to 1 equivalent regardless of whether the thing being had is a tangible object, an intangible property, etc.
I found it interesting that in Mandarin "没有" (not have) can be used to indicated that you have not done something. For example, in the English, "I have not taken the garbage out." We negate the possessive verb "to have" in order indicate that the speaker did not do something, this behavior seems to also occur in Mandarin.
And vice versa, in Taiwanese Mandarin the non-negated form of the possessive verb can be used to indicate that an event did occur (I don't believe this is true for Mandarin as a whole but I know this to be true for Taiwanese Mandarin).
My question is, is this a neat coincidental similarity between the two languages or is this a known phenomenon caused by some underlying linguistic pattern?
