Deal with it

By R.L.G.

LANGUAGE-learners like to swap war-stories about their struggles, whether with Chinese tones, Japanese honorifics, German articles, Russian cases or Danish pronunciation. Each language challenges the learner with something unique. After twenty years of knowing passable French, Johnson learned today that two French words are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural: amour (love) and orgue (organ, the musical kind). It is un amour fou, but des amours folles. This kind of thing can only make the learner shake his head: isn’t French grammar complicated enough already, to say nothing of French amours? It is easy to spend an entire lifetime learning the quirks of one’s native language, without having to boggle the mind with a foreign one.

All this diversity, when not a headache, is something to admire. But one quirk unites the world’s languages rather than dividing them: the weirdness of prepositions. Not all languages have prepositions as such: some languages use word endings instead of prepositions. But whether standalone or as endings, they are odd all around.

Prepositions seem simple enough. A child learns them as spatial relations, perhaps in a book with deceptively simple pictures. The box is on the table. Now it is under the table. The ball is in the box. Now it is next to the box.

But the majority of preposition usages are either metaphorical or abstract. A new book by Peter Littger, a columnist for Der Spiegel online, illustrates the problems in English, from the foreign learner's perspective. In "The Devil Lies in the Detail", Mr Littger addresses a chapter to Germans’ perplexity. Germans sensibly say, when travelling by rail, Ich bin im Zug—I am in the train. Why on earth, then, do English-speakers say I’m on the train? It sounds an awful lot like riding on the roof. But English does the same with on the bus, on the plane, on the tram. If someone is in the plane it sounds as she might be in the luggage hold. The only exception to the on-preference seems to be in the car.

Then there are the metaphorical uses: the literal-to-figurative jump is clear enough in in transition, in motion and the like. But sometimes the metaphors seem stretched: why is something under construction? Sure, there is sometimes scaffolding and protective material over a construction site, but rarely is a building fully under wrapping like a Christo project.

Many preposition combinations are simply to be learned by heart: there is no spatial or even metaphorical reason obvious to the naked eye. Why is a book by an author, and not from the same person, as it is in many other European languages? Why do we talk about something when other European languages talk over or of it? To this category might be added the famous English phrasal verbs, for which there are whole specialised dictionaries: to put up with, run down, see to and their like cannot be figured out by knowing the meaning of the main verb and the preposition.

Poor foreign learners like Mr Littger often have to learn two versions, or at least to understand them: British and American English often differ in the prepositions (or sometimes, in the attached bits like articles) that go with set nouns: at the weekend/on the weekend, in the High Street/on Main Street, in future/in the future, in hospital/in the hospital, chat to/chat with and so on. After twenty years of near-daily contact with British English, your American columnist is still learning new British phrasal verbs. A colleague was booking a hotel, and said I think we can run to breakfast. A bit of puzzlement and a British dictionary solved the mystery: It meant I think we can stretch the budget to cover the admittedly overpriced hotel breakfast.

Finally, there are forms in transition, and widespread forms that are nonetheless considered errors. Different to and different than can be heard every day—the former especially in Britain, the latter in America—but the traditional form is different from. To finish school or university in America was once to be graduated from Harvard, a usage that peaked around a century ago. Today’s common form is to graduate from Harvard—and this, now, is losing ground to to graduate Harvard, with no preposition at all, which annoys traditionalists.

English-speakers learning another language will be in for the same all over again: Spaniards dream with (not about) something. In the unlikely event that Germans schedule something at an approximate time, it is gegen (against) seven o'clock, not about or around. The ancient Greeks, progenitors of western logic, had many prepositions that do bizarre double duty to the English eye: meta means both with and after; kata means both according to and against. (Some such double meanings are distinguished by the cases of the nouns that follow. A few are not.)

Some readers will be tempted to quote Churchill here, supposedly to a pedant who corrected a sentence that ended in a preposition: “this is the kind of arrant nonsense up with which I will not put.” Alas, Churchill never said this. Fortunately, there is nothing wrong with ending a sentence with a preposition in English. But the rest of the weirdness of prepositions, you are just going to have to put up with.