The Etymology of the word 有的 Im having trouble wrapping my brain around why the characters &quot;有的&quot; are chose to represent the idea of &quot;a smaller amount of a larger group&quot; or more directly in english: the word &quot;some&quot;.
On their own, I have learned that &quot;有&quot; means: &quot;to have&quot; or &quot;to exist&quot;, and the character &quot;的&quot; means: the possessive particle similar to &quot;'s&quot; in english.
I cant figure out exactly how to make sense of those two meanings to come up with the word &quot;some&quot; in a logical way. So far I've been told that &quot;it's just how the words exist and we just accept it, and don't think about it&quot; but that really bothers me. There must be a logical reason behind why its that specific combination of those two specific characters to convey that one specific meaning.
The best way that I've come to think of it is &quot;Of the existence&quot;, but that bothers me because that would be backwards from the characters.
If you take an English sentence like:

There are people who believe the earth is flat.

We can see a similar phenomenon to that in Chinese. The phrasing of there are tells us that it is not everybody who believes the earth is flat but that some people hold this conviction.
Likewise, 有的 plays a similar role. You already know that 有 expresses something akin to, &quot;have&quot; or &quot;has.&quot; If you treat 有的 like &quot;there are&quot; from the example sentence above it is easy to see how the language works similarly to English.