Temporary Possesive case

Question

Is anyone aware of a language, natlang or conlang, that has, for lack of a different term, has a Temporary Possessive case?

What I mean is a case the essentially indicates "this thing that is mine, but only for a brief period/I don't own it". A common everyday example would be, say, you borrow a friend's vehicle and unintentionally park it so it interferes with something. A cop comes up to you, points at it and asks if that if your vehicle, and could you move it.

"Yes, that's mine" (that is the vehicle that I drove here and have the keys for) and "No, it isn't mine" (I don't own the vehicle) are both entirely valid answers in English, and a lot of other languages, depending on how pedantic/being a dick the speaker feels like being. So is there an example of a language that distinguishes between the two situations where something is mine in the sense I'm in possession/responsible/using but don't actually own it versus I am considered the ultimate possessor of this.

Answer 1

I don't know of an existing example, but the first thing I'm thinking of is this:
Some languages, like (in some cases) Ainu mark possession basically by relative clause. So "my dog" in Ainu is
ku-kor seta
1SG-have dog
"dog that I have"
And furthermore, some linguists suggest that in the past, there were a lot more verbs than just kor "to have" that could indicate possession. For example, you could have the same construction, but with "dog that I raised" to indicate that your dog is yours in the sense that you raised it. Or, another example, "food that he eats" would be "his food", where "his" is in the sense of being his to eat.

So, to get back to your question, I find it completely believable that in a language that indicates possession like this, you could have a verb for "to borrow" in a construction "X that I borrow" meaning "my X (until I give it back)".

Answer 2

There are languages that distinguish between alienable and inalienable possession—that is, can the thing be removed from its possessor, or not? For example, Mikasuki: am-akni is "my meat (that can be separated from me)" (that is, a hamburger I bought and paid for), while ac-akni is "my meat (that cannot be separated from me)" (that is, my body itself).

In many Polynesian languages, where the alienable possessive is used if the possessor can acquire or discard the possessee by their own power, and the inalienable possessive if they can't: Samoan lana susu "her milk" (can be discarded), lona susu "her breast" (cannot be discarded).

So it's not hard to imagine a language that distinguishes short-term from long-term possession in the same way.

Answer 3

This isn't quite what you're looking for, but there is precedent for languages ending up with multiple possessive construction that aren't quite equivalent. We see this in English, where we inherited one possessive construction from Anglo-Saxon (the noun's), and borrowed another from French (of the noun).

In many circumstances they're equivalent, though the Anglo-Saxon one is more prosaic and the French one more lofty and formal. But the French one can be used to indicate either the subject or object of a verb-turned-noun (the love of God is God loving someone, the fear of God is someone fearing God), while the Anglo-Saxon one can only indicate the subject (God's love, *God's fear). This means that constructions like "Alice's photo of Bob" are unambiguous: Alice photographed Bob, not the other way around.

A similar situation could have arisen in your conlang: there's an inherited construction and a borrowed one, but one can be used for any sort of possession, temporary or not, and the other can only be used for long-term ownership. As a result, the first one becomes associated with short-term temporary possession whenever there's any ambiguity, because if you meant long-term ownership, you could have used the unambiguously long-term one.