To Have and To Hold

My Portuguese book gave me a majorly important verb conjugation today: tenar. It means to have. The equivalent in French means to hold; I imagine this will cause me some confusion for a while until I get used to it. I also suspect it will show up in verb conjugations, just as to have does in English and avoir does in French.
The verb conjugates as follows:

Eu tenho I have
voce tem You have
ele tem He has / It has
ela tem She has / It has
Nos temos We have
Voces tem You all have
Eles tem They (masculine or mixed) have
Elas tem They (feminine only) have

Just s with avoir in French, tenar in Portugues is used for some things for which English uses to be, namely:

1. Age. That's right. In Portuguese, as in French, your age is something you have, not something you are. I wonder if speakers of these languages regard advancing years as an accomplishment, rather than a deformity. The number of beautiful young things popping out of the pages of French fashion magazines does not suggest this is likely, however.
2. Fear. These also have me waxing philosophical. I wonder if these cultures understand fear as something you have and thus choose to hold onto. Do Brazilians have a lower instance of anxiety disorders?
3. Hunger and thirst. I wonder if Brazilians and French people have a saner attitude toward food than we Americans. Maybe this is the secret that explains how the French can eat so much cheese and drink so much wine without getting fat.
4. Rightness. In Portuguese, when you're having an argument with someone, you don't say, "I'm right"; you say, "I have reason." As yet, I haven't learned how to say "I'm wrong."

My book is getting into a new unit dealing with disease and medicine. This has me wondering if I'm now going to learn what the Portuguese attitude toward body parts. French somehow manages to disembody your body; a Frenchman cannot say, "I opened my eyes" but must rather say, "I opened myself at the eyes", because in French body parts cannot be used with possessive adjectives. I'm curious as to whether Portuguese shares this peculiarity.

Word Count Today: 239 known, 26 unknown.