What prepositional words are confusing in English and other languages, and difficult when translating to English?
Asked by
JLeslie (
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January 3rd, 2021
from iPhone
Prepositions are words like: around, on, in, to, above, from, of, between; you can see a full list here: https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/prepositions-list.htm. I was taught it’s what you can do to a mountain, but that doesn’t really cover all of them.
I’ve thought about this before, I see my husband and his siblings struggle with “in” and “on,” because those are the same word in Spanish, the word “en.“ Also, the words “of” and “for” are both “de” in Spanish.
In a recent discussion someone was trying to tell the audience that it’s not freedom of religion, but rather freedom from religion. Even I have trouble with that, but to my husband I think that would sound exactly the same because of his first language.
What are some examples of confusing prepositions.
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3 Answers
This question needs a longer answer than I can give right now, but one consideration is that prepositions figure in a lot of idioms, and idioms are hard to translate and hard to master in any language. An idiom isn’t a special phrase like a simile or a saying; it’s just the way we say something that isn’t a directly literal use of its components.
For example:
come at
come to
come up with
come across
come off as
come over to
come by
come along
The boldfaced words after come are prepositions (although not all used literally), and the phrases are all idioms. Try out combinations with some other common verb. Get will keep you busy for a while, so get on with it.
^^^Which is much different from get with it (or even get it on).
The ones that are different. Every language has its own prepositions that they use in different cases, and while there are many similarities and parallels, there are also many differences.
To give just a couple of examples, the Italian preposition “in” is largely equivalent to English “in”, and the Italian preposition “a” can be translated to English as “to”, “in”, or possibly other phrases, depending on what’s being said. There’s also irregular overlap with some of those English prepositions and Italian “da”, which might translate to English “from” or “to” or “at”, again depending on the expression.
Never mind that in Italian, the prepositions are very often combined with articles that indicate the number and gender of who or what’s being referred to, and also can transform based on the first letters of the next word following, e.g.:
“In the United States” -> negli Stati Uniti
(where negli = in + gli (plural form of definite article before a word starting with s followed by a consonant)
That’s not really difficult after it’s been learned, but it does take learning and practicing using the rules or learning “by ear”.
There are potentially many specific differences in the use of each preposition, in each pair of languages compared.
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