Locative variation
« previous post | next post »
One of the hard parts of learning a new language is figuring out what preposition to use when (or what postposition, or what case, or etc.). This can be tricky even for simple locative expressions:
I live in France. J'habite en France. I live in Paris J'habite à Paris. I live in Japan. J'habite au Japon. I live in the forest. J'habite dans la forêt.
…and so on. Except that you could also say "J'habite sur Paris", meaning something like "I live in the Paris area".
Or could you? A few years ago, a discussion on Quora of 'Quelle est la différence entre "j'habite à Paris" et "j'habite sur Paris" ?' provoked a fair amount of socio-cultural-linguistic peeving.
For example:
Les gens qui habitent à Paris sont très bien, charmants, élégants et parlent un français parfait alors que les gens qui habitent sur Paris ne méritent pas qu'on leur adresse la parole.
The people who live "à Paris" are good, charming, elegant, and speak perfect French, whereas the people who live "sur Paris" don't deserve any attempt at communication.
La différence, c'est que l'une est correcte : « j'habite à Paris.», et l'autre non. À moins d'habiter dans un ballon captif attaché à la tour Eiffel, dans lequel vous pouvez dire effectivement «J'habite sur Paris.»
The difference is that the first one is correct: "j'habite à Paris", and the second one isn't. Unless you live in a balloon attached to the Eiffel tower, in which you can indeed say "J'habite sur Paris".
I believe that it's considered formally correct to use "sur" in cases like
I live on the roof. J'habite sur le toit.
But apparently the "sur Paris" phrasing is sneered at, either because the Académie doesn't approve, or because the inhabitants of the banlieues are scorned, or both.
Returning to the cross-linguistic differences in locative prepositions, Spanish is (I think) even more invariant than English:
I live in France. J'habite en France. Vivo en Francia. I live in Paris J'habite à Paris. Vivo en Paris. I live in Japan. J'habite au Japon. Vivo en Japon. I live in the forest. J'habite dans la forêt. Vivo en el bosque. I live on the roof. J'habite sur le toit. Vivo en el techo.
And in English we live "at" an address (e.g. "at 2633 16th Street"), but in Spanish that's also "en" the address ("en el número 2633 de la calle 16").
Probably someone has traced the evolution of such locatives across linguistic histories, but a quick Google Scholar search didn't turn it up.
(And feel free to correct my prepositions (and/or verbs) if I've gotten them wrong…)
jhh said,
December 18, 2023 @ 2:50 pm
She teaches in Chicago.
She teaches at Chicago.
The second one, of course, means that she teaches at the University of Chicago.
chris said,
December 18, 2023 @ 3:26 pm
As a non-French-speaker I find the distinction between France and Japan exceptionally baffling. How can you split your grammatical categories finely enough to get those into different ones?
If you speak French about living in the Vatican, do you treat it as a country or a city?
David C said,
December 18, 2023 @ 3:27 pm
An interesting (at least to me) case is deciding whether to use "in" or "on" for an island that is also a sovereign nation. Some times you will hear "We will be staying in St. Lucia" and sometimes "We will be staying on St. Lucia." Depends, I guess, on whether you want to emphasize the nation-ness or the island-ness.
Y. Henel said,
December 18, 2023 @ 3:50 pm
Not to defend French :) but there is something similar in Hungarian:
In Hungary: Magyarországon [the postfix' meaning is “on”]
In France: Franciaországban [here it´s “in”]
For Vatican, I would say: j'habite au Vatican.
As for the distinction between towns and countries, we have:
j'habite à Québec/Koweit (the town), au Québec/Koweit (the country).
But to make things murkier, you can often find “En Avignon” to avoid the double a “à A”.
Mark Liberman said,
December 18, 2023 @ 3:52 pm
@Chris: "As a non-French-speaker I find the distinction between France and Japan exceptionally baffling. How can you split your grammatical categories finely enough to get those into different ones?"
I think it's partly a matter of (grammatical) gender:
"Il habitait en Thaïlande." vs. "Il habitait au Siam."
aligns with
"La Thaïlande est en Asie". vs. "Le Siam est en Asie."
Similarly,
"Elle habite au Maroc." vs. "Elle habite en Algérie".
Y. Henel said,
December 18, 2023 @ 3:59 pm
@Mark:
I think you're spot on. This is the link to an article by the Office québécois de la langue française about that very subject:
https://vitrinelinguistique.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/23897/la-syntaxe/les-prepositions/preposition-devant-un-nom/les-prepositions-devant-un-nom-de-pays
Andreas Johansson said,
December 18, 2023 @ 4:04 pm
@David C:
It gets trickier when the island and state aren't coterminus. To me at least, Belfast is on Ireland but not in Ireland.
David Cameron Staples said,
December 18, 2023 @ 4:14 pm
Part of the complication, of course, is the compound participles in French, combining with some countries requiring the definite article.
It's not "Japon", it's "le Japon", so !"en le Japon" → "au Japon".
"The United States" = "Les États-Unis", !"en les États-Unis" → "aux États-Unis"
Feminine country names don't do this, so "la Grèce" → "en Grèce"
In Spanish you typically get neither of those complications. Most countries don't use the definite article, and "en" doesn't synthesize with "le". (And while "de" = "from" does, "de le" → "del", it doesn't do that with proper nouns. "Vengo del bosque", but "Vengo de El Salvador".
The Scandinavian languages distinguish "in" = "i" and "at/on" = "på": Norwegian "Jeg bor i Frankrike", "Jeg bor i Japan", "Jeg bor i Paris", "Jeg bor i skogen" ("I live in the woods"), but "Jeg bor på taket" ("I live on the roof") and similar in Swedish and Danish. An address is "på": "Jeg bor på 12 gata 2633.
Peter Taylor said,
December 18, 2023 @ 4:29 pm
@chris, the difference between à and au is a definite article (au is a contraction of *à le). English has the same inconsistent use of definite articles with some countries: the Ukraine is now out of vogue because (AIUI) Ukrainians consider it derogatory, and the Argentine was superseded by Argentina a long time ago, but we still talk about e.g. the Philippines, which is just Filipinas the language of the former colonial power.
Garrett Wollman said,
December 18, 2023 @ 5:03 pm
We've previously had this discussion here in LLog in the context of Finnish and the use of the inessive vs. the adessive case, which varies from one place-name to another and is just something you have to memorize: "Tamperellä" (~on~ in Tempere) vs. "Helsingissä" (in Helsinki), or for countries, "Yhdysvalloissa" (in the United States) vs. "Venäjällä" (in/on Russia). The pattern continues for the other positional cases: places that take the inessive also take the illative and the elative for the respective motions, and likewise for the adessive/allative/ablative.
Benjamin Geer said,
December 18, 2023 @ 5:05 pm
In cognitive semantics, spatial prepositions are analysed in terms of image schemas: in French you are “dans” something that’s conceptualised as a container (as in “dans la rue”, because the schema for “rue” is of a narrow space between rows of buildings), but “sur” something that’s conceptualised as a surface (as in “sur le boulevard”, because the schema for “boulevard” is of a wide area, not necessarily bordered by buildings).
Claude Vandeloise was one of the pioneers of this approach: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3628047.html
For a similar analysis of English prepositions, see Tyler and Evans, The Semantics of English Prepositions: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/semantics-of-english-prepositions/039E17D16E88E1FA3B582EED8019A38C
Garrett Wollman said,
December 18, 2023 @ 5:06 pm
Just noticed that my rusty memory gave me the wrong spelling (and wrong vowel harmony!) for "Tampereella" above. We apologize for the error.
Garrett Wollman said,
December 18, 2023 @ 5:16 pm
Oh, and now I remembered the other thing that I wanted to mention: It used to be common, in the English of Victorian times, to say that a building was located in a street, which is still a live usage in BrE, whereas in modern usage, especially AmE, we say on instead. There is also considerable variation over the past 150 years with the punctuation, capitalization, and arthrousness (arthrosity?). In the style guide used for legal drafting by the Massachusetts General Court, street type designations are still downcased, unlike the normal AmE practice: a law relating to the street normal people call "Mass. Ave." would write it "Massachusetts avenue" with a lower-case "a". (Probably with a few minutes in a law library you could find examples from when it was normal to hyphenate street names.
Coby said,
December 18, 2023 @ 5:19 pm
In Spanish, Argentina is sometimes la Argentina, Ecuador is sometimes el Ecuador (officially República del Ecuador) and Peru is usually (but not always) el Perú (officially República del Perú). Also, India is often la India, and Estados Unidos may or may not be preceded by los. And of course it's always El Salvador and la República Dominicana
Coby said,
December 18, 2023 @ 5:25 pm
In French, habiter can also be used transitively, without any preposition.
Jon lennox said,
December 18, 2023 @ 5:27 pm
In regards Garrett Wollman's discussion of "in/on" for a street: this brings to mind Madness's song "Our House", where the description "in the middle of our street" always causes Americans to imagine the house is rather obstructing traffic.
Andrew McCarthy said,
December 18, 2023 @ 5:36 pm
@Garrett Wollman
Until the mid-20th century or so (IIRC) in British English, it was common for the numbers in street addresses to be followed by a comma. So that, for instance, you’d write that the Prime Minister lived at 10, Downing Street.
I remember seeing this format used on some postwar newspaper advertisements which JRR Tolkien doodled on that have been shown in exhibitions about his art (he dabbled as an amateur artist on occasion as well as a writer and philologist).
Philip Taylor said,
December 18, 2023 @ 6:03 pm
[Not a native speaker but …] For me, "J'habite en France" is more naturally (and perhaps more frequently) expressed as "J'habite la France".
Philip Taylor said,
December 18, 2023 @ 6:05 pm
Andrew (cc Garrett) — I have always separated the number from the road or street, as in (e.g.,) "72, The Course", "4, Raynham Villas" and so on.
Mark Liberman said,
December 18, 2023 @ 7:11 pm
@Coby: "In French, habiter can also be used transitively, without any preposition."
Indeed — unlike verbs of similar meaning like résider, vivre, etc.
The transitive form is like the English cognate "inhabit" — which however doesn't have a usage with (any choice of) preposition. So another set of quirks to be learned…
mg said,
December 18, 2023 @ 9:41 pm
The issue isn't just locatives, nor just French. There are differences in preposition choices between British and American English, or even between U.S. regions (do you wait "in line" or "on line"?) Many preposition choices are to a large extent arbitrary and you can't use logic to decide which to use.
Chris Button said,
December 18, 2023 @ 10:20 pm
Since "sur" literally translates as "on top of", it seems a somewhat unlikely semantic extension unless something like diglossia is originally involved.
Peter Grubtal said,
December 19, 2023 @ 3:59 am
@mg
Agree entirely: prepositions are one of the most difficult aspects of language learning. The arbitrariness is why ChatGPT & co. are so successful at producing idiomatic text: they don't use logic.
Spanish learners seem to have it easy with "en" covering many cases, but there's loads of fun to be had with por / para.
KevinM said,
December 19, 2023 @ 10:17 am
@ Garret Wollman "Probably with a few minutes in a law library you could find examples from when it was normal to hyphenate street names."
Or you might try the New-York Historical Society.
Rodger Cunningham said,
December 19, 2023 @ 11:05 am
@Andreas Johansson: To me, Belfast is "in Ireland" but not "in the Republic." I'm an American of Irish Protestant background.
J.W. Brewer said,
December 19, 2023 @ 1:47 pm
"I lived with them on Montague Street
In a basement down the stairs
There was music in the cafés at night
And revolution in the air."
Maybe the "on" only works because the narrator isn't specifying the exact address on the street? But maybe "at" doesn't work if you specify more finally. "We lived in #4B, 123 Montague St." sounds fine. As does, more autobiographically for me, something like "That summer we lived on the third floor of 366 Elm."
I think there have been some prior LL posts trying to explicate in/on as involving metaphors about containers v. metaphors about surfaces, but of course for certain constructions sometimes the usual construction comes first and the spatial metaphor it can be claimed to fit is an afterthought if not indeed an ex post just-so story explaining a construction not obviously motivated in fact by the spatial metaphor.
Sniffnoy said,
December 19, 2023 @ 3:13 pm
Of course in English islands are also something on lives on rather than in, e.g., "I live on Long Island", not "I live in Long Island". Actually, streets are another example of this — you mentioned living at an address, but if one goes to just street rather than full address, it becomes "on" — "I live on Main Street", not "I live at Main Street" or "I live in Main Street". Blocks also get "on" — "She lives on this block", not "she lives at this block" or "she lives in this block". Oh also floors — "I live on the 14th floor", not "I live in the 14th floor" or "I live at the 14th floor".
Barbara Phillips Long said,
December 19, 2023 @ 4:35 pm
"I have often walked down this street before
But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before
All at once am I several stories high
Knowing I'm on the street where you live."
So, the lyrics for "On the Street Where You Live" are a dead giveaway that My Fair Lady lyricist Alan Jay Lerner was American.
= = = = =
Just to mix French with American English, there seems to be no particular rule about living "on" or "in" a cul de sac. The headline and teaser from this post are not consistent:
The Downsides of Living in a Cul-de-Sac
If you're dreaming of one day living on a cul-de-sac, there are a few downsides to ponder that could drive you crazy.
https://www.realtor.com/advice/buy/the-downsides-of-living-in-a-cul-de-sac/
Adrian Bailey said,
December 19, 2023 @ 7:26 pm
It's as well to educate oneself early on that different languages approach things in different ways. (Or people have different ways of looking at the world?) Notice not only that French has different words for "in", but that it doesn't differentiate between "in" and "to", so that "en France" means both "in France" and "to France", and "à Paris" means both "in Paris" and "to Paris". Meanwhile German also several words for "to": "nach London" and "nach Deutschland" but "in die Schweiz". And for no obvious reason you can say either "in den Supermarkt" or "zu dem Supermarkt". But remember that "zu Hause" means *at* home.
Mike Maxwell said,
December 19, 2023 @ 9:11 pm
Peter Grubtal wrote "prepositions are one of the most difficult aspects of language learning."
Ah, then you'd love Tzeltal, a Mayan language of southern Mexico. It has exactly two prepositions: 'sok', with the rough meaning of "with", and 'ta', used for everything else.
Of course what the right hand takes away, the left hand gives back. To say "in the house", you say "ta yut na'", literally " its-inside house", and so forth. The semantic distinctions are made using nouns possessed by the head noun.
Mike Maxwell said,
December 19, 2023 @ 9:17 pm
The auto-formatting messed up that last comment of mine–I tried to use something that looked unfortunately like an XML/HTML tag, and it disappeared. The literal meaning of "ta yut na" is "ta its-inside house" where this time I have not tried to replace "ta" with a gloss in less-than/greater-than brackets. ("yut" is "3-inside", i.e. the noun "ut" meaning "inside" with a prefix "y-" meaning third person possessive)
Cool McFundog said,
December 19, 2023 @ 10:22 pm
The Hungarian case raised by Y. Henel is interesting. Place names outside of Hungary are almost always "in", so Londonban "in London", etc. (except St. Petersburg is Szent Péterváron, "on"). Hungarian places take the "on" locatives (unless they end in a nasal or -r or -város "city"), so Pesten "in Pest". Some even take an archaic locative case that is no longer productive except for special placenames, so "in Pécs" is Pécsett.
There's even a joke poem about it:
Miskolcon ám Debrecenben, Győrött, Pécsett, Szegeden;
amíg mindezt megtanulod, beleőszülsz, idegen.
Lasius said,
December 20, 2023 @ 5:24 am
@Adrian Bailey
Those two have different meanings though.
You could also say "ins Deutschland" if you want to be fancy. But the main difference here is that Switzerland is of feminine grammatical Gender while London and Germany are neuter.
Peter Grubtal said,
December 20, 2023 @ 5:38 am
Lasius said
there's also "auf die Post".
Daniel Deutsch said,
December 20, 2023 @ 7:36 am
Someone could say “ Vivo al Corso Garibaldi,12, a Urbino, nelle Marche, in Italia.
Barry Cusack said,
December 20, 2023 @ 10:58 am
I remember from my schooldays that Latin has a seemingly simple rule about locatives (expressing where a place is):
Large Mediterranean islands take a preposition: in Sicilia. This follows the normal Latin rule. A special case is small Mediterranean islands: these take no preposition, and take the locative, which is usually, the same as the genitive case. E.g: Romae, in/at Rome.
We were told that the dividing line between small and large islands was Rhodes, which could follow either pattern.
I do not know if this kind of thing has survived, in any way, into modern languages.
Brett said,
December 20, 2023 @ 5:21 pm
@Sniffnoy: Most of your examples I agree with, but (even as an American), "She lives in this block," sounds fine to me.
Russinoff said,
December 20, 2023 @ 11:25 pm
From my preferred authority on French usage:
"j'habite sur Paris” is just grammatically incorrect but has been gaining in popularity as a result of the “sur” preposition being used when the verb is expressing a movement.
For instance, saying « je déménage sur Paris » (I’m moving to Paris) or “l’armée marche sur Rome” (the army is marching on Rome) is correct. Since a lot of people got used to saying “Je monte sur Paris pour les fetes” (I’m going to Paris for the holidays) and other similar sentences, the sentence “j’habite sur Paris” took hold.
There doesn’t seem to be any socio-cultural implications to the use of that sentence though, I’ve heard it from the mouths of posh Parisians just as much as suburban low-wage workers. It does however demonstrate a disdain for proper grammar.
Chris Button said,
December 21, 2023 @ 10:02 am
@ Russinoff
Thanks for clearing that up. That makes sense how the semantic extension from "on (top of)" could have happened.
David Marjanović said,
December 22, 2023 @ 12:05 pm
…Hungary is flatter than France, so I suppose saying you live on top of it does make some sense… but Tampere compared to Helsinki?
Uh… in den Supermarkt means "into the supermarket"; zum Supermarkt (*zu dem is always contracted, unless dem is a not-quite-standard demonstrative pronoun and accordingly stressed) means "to the supermarket, but not into it".
Nach is used for placenames that don't have articles. A few countries do have them and accordingly take in to express "into".
This fossil, and the dative case that zu takes, are the last remnants of the times when zu referred to places instead of directions.
Adrian Bailey said,
December 24, 2023 @ 3:13 am
David said:
Uh… in den Supermarkt means "into the supermarket"; zum Supermarkt (*zu dem is always contracted, unless dem is a not-quite-standard demonstrative pronoun and accordingly stressed) means "to the supermarket, but not into it".
This is wrong. As in English, (almost) no one who says "Ich gehe zum Supermarkt" means "I'm going to the supermarket, but not into it." Utterances like "Ich gehe zur Apotheke" and "Ich gehe in die Apotheke" are interchangeable.
Peter Grubtal said,
December 24, 2023 @ 10:42 am
"Utterances like "Ich gehe zur Apotheke" and "Ich gehe in die Apotheke" are interchangeable"
Beg to differ. The first you would use if for example you are at home some way away and intend to go to the chemist. The second one if you were closer to it and intended to enter it.
Peter Grubtal said,
December 24, 2023 @ 10:49 am
In fact, I think the chemist belongs to the same group as the post office and the bank, and so you might say "ich gehe auf die Apotheke".
V said,
December 28, 2023 @ 12:48 pm
Coby : "In Spanish, Argentina is sometimes la Argentina, Ecuador is sometimes el Ecuador (officially República del Ecuador) and Peru is usually (but not always) el Perú (officially República del Perú). Also, India is often la India, and Estados Unidos may or may not be preceded by los. And of course it's always El Salvador and la República Dominicana"
Likewise, in Bulgarian, when used in a sentence it's "Съединените американски щати" — "The United States of America" with a definite article; "Руската федерация" — "The Russian Federation" when used in a sentence, but the entities when not used in a sentence are "Съединени Американски Щати" — "United American States" and so on when mentioned in isolation.