In English, it is common to say "I have" to mean "I own."
i.e. I have this book = I own this book.
So when someone says "I have a right," they mistakenly believe that the right is a thing that they own. But this is misguided. A quirk of grammar that gets in the way of clarity. Rights are not something you own. It is the other way around. Ownership is you are enrighted with. Ownership is made up of rights. The concept of rights are more atomic, more fundamental than the concept of ownership. You own something only insofar as you exercise the rights of ownership over it. This means that you can break down ownership into its component rights and pick and choose which rights you want to exercise over your property. The reverse is not true. You cannot break down rights into atoms of ownership.
This is a peculiar thing we do as humans. In the same way we understand melodies before notes, faces before features, we understand the more sophisticated concept of ownership before we are able to grasp what the more fundamental concept of rights is.
This is why the word for "rights" has only emerged a handful of times throughout different cultures in the world. Rights is usually with cobbled together from some pre-existing word that points to an abstract good. In the case of English (and other Germanic languages), the word “rights” (as in the entitlement) comes from “right” (as in normative evaluation). Not all cultures have a word for the concept of "rights." But all cultures have a word for "ownership".
In Malay, the word for right is hak. Hak is derived from the Arabic term for truth (haqq).
There was a funny phrase in Malay I heard this week: Kau berhak tapi kau indaʔ berlayak.
Roughly translated into English it means: You have a right but you are not deserving.
But the verb berhak does not quite translate into English as cleanly as one would hope. Berhak does not mean you have a right in the sense of owning a right. Rather, berhak is a verb meaning you are invested-with-a-right.
There currently does not exist a word in English that perfectly corresponds to the Malay term berhak. So if I were to coin a word, the English equivalent would be something like "enrighted":
You are enrighted but you are not deserving.
Disambiguating the term “Rights”
When people talk about rights, about 75% of the time, they're referring to claims that correlate with duties on the part of others. When people say “I have a right to education,” “the right to free speech,” or “property rights,” they almost always mean a claim that correlates with others’ duties.
About 15% of the time rights refers to privileges. For example, “the right to travel,” “the right to remain silent,” or “the right to marry.” Many of these are really freedoms (liberties, or absence of duty not to act).
The rest of the time when the term rights are evoked, they refer to powers and immunities. i.e. “the right to sue,” “the right to contract,” “the right to vote,” “the right not to be subjected to ex post facto laws."
These distinctions were first delineated systematically by the luminous American legal scholar, Wesley Hohfeld in the early 1900s. These are really important distinctions that often get conflated. A liberty, for instance, should never be confused with a claim-right, otherwise known as a right proper.
Therefore, when we are attributing rights to someone we should take care to not mistake an act of licensing with the act of enrighting.