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. More.

See: The Economist

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