I have a preposition for you

[calimac]

As rozk notes, when a news story describes "a woman who ... has accidentally fallen into a Picasso painting," italics added, the first thought ought to be of a secondary-world fantasy novel set in the land of Picasso's imagination, and not of falling against or through the painting and tearing a rip in it.

Well, prepositions are strange things. The most challenging part of learning German, and I expect of other languages, is finding that there's no one-to-one matchup of prepositions between the languages: despite clear dictionary meanings, there are places where you'd use a different preposition in German than you would in English.

Even in English, uses are not always standardized. Has it ever occurred to you that the phrase "underwater" doesn't actually mean under the water? The Chunnel goes under the water. What "underwater" actually means is in the water, while the phrase "in the water" means on the water, while the phrase "on the water" usually means next to the water.

Yet somehow we manage.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

As in the old song...

The Chunnel goes under the water,
The Chunnel goes under the sea,
The Chunnel goes under the water,
So bring me some booze duty free.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

For years and years (still, somewhat) my dyslexic brain helpfully took the German prepositions I was drilling all through my teens and cross-wired them with English ones, so I could use the wrong one and the wrong time in two languages!

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I deal with the other side of that professionally and used to more often: English prepositions are one of the characteristic sources of error for non-native writers. And not surprisingly; it's quite arbitrary that, for example, the price of movie tickets is dependent on the money supply, but independent of the phase of the moon. Really if you consider the etymology it seems it ought to be dependent from. . . .

[margdean56.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that; it's one of the markers that lead me to deduce that someone is a non-native speaker when they're, for instance, writing online and don't otherwise show an "accent." It's common for them to get everything else right and trip up on the prepositions.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

You had me up to while the phrase "in the water" means on the water; if I say, "The kids are in the water," I don't mean they're strolling across it.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It means they're floating on top of it, only partially submerged. For other surfaces, even permeable ones, on rather than in would be used.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Maybe not floating, though probably only partially submerged--but they could be swimming under the surface or diving to the bottom occasionally.

Can you give me an example of the situation in your second sentence? I can't think of anything. "On" certainly isn't used for snow--we play in the snow, and also in the sand and in the dirt, not on it, even if no part of our body is "submerged" in the substance.

But certainly prepositions are tricky, in any language I have any familiarity with.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

I expect that some of our weird prepositional uses exist because other words have dropped out of phrases.

"It is underwater" is probably shorted from "It is under the water's surface."

"It is in the water" when referencing ships could be from comparing a boat going "into the water" with how a swimmer goes "into the water". The problem is that of course the boat sits on the surface (with only part of its body going below surface level), while a swimmer does not react quite the same way.

A house "on the water" was probably originally just "on the water-front".

But in English, especially American English, there is a tendency to drop out "understood" words. So much so that we usually forget that there was probably a longer (and more grammatically correct) formulation of the statement.