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English is weird
Morituri:
I've been thinking about the way English uses prepositions. Or, alternatively, I could have said I've been thinking it over. There is the obvious use denoting something's actual position relative to something else - between, behind, before, below, et cetera. But in English prepositions also do a strange array of seemingly unrelated semantic functions.
We mean different things when we say a politician is on the right or in the right. The same politician can be behind an idea or over it. We say that we believe in things or that we know of things or that we are working on things or that we have been worked over. But when we say that we have been worked over, we mean a different thing than we mean when we say that we are doing something over. We talk about one idea being built on several others, or that we choose this over that. When we want to know what reasoning supports a peculiar idea or how a peculiar situation came to be, we ask what's behind it. We can be so distraught that we are beside ourselves. And then someone will tell us to just get over it. Maybe by going and spending some time on a hobby that we're into.
And so on. Coming from a language like Russian that completely lacks prepositions it must be incredibly difficult to learn all the ways we English speakers use them. None of these are really inherently obvious. They just seem that way because we're used to them.
Tova:
There's no understanding prepositional idioms. They are just a bunch of things you have to memorise.
pwhodges:
Join the argument - different from or different to? ;)
Tova:
I am not taking that bait. :-D
N.N. Marf:
--- Quote from: Morituri on 26 Mar 2021, 08:53 ---And so on. Coming from a language like Russian that completely lacks prepositions it must be incredibly difficult to learn all the ways we English speakers use them. None of these are really inherently obvious. They just seem that way because we're used to them.
--- End quote ---
Idiomatic prepositionalities rarely affect otherwise clear writing---any preposition, vaguely, works. By that synthetic language, where all grammar is by affixes, coming by this analytic one, having separate words carrying grammar, they are perceived by space-separated affixes.
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