"Prepositions are tricky"
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…as AntC said in a comment on yesterday's "Different from/than/to?" post.
For example, different was borrowed from French différent. But the French use the preposition de with that adjective, e.g. "Pourquoi les Québécois ont-ils un accent différent de celui des Français?". And de is mostly translated as "of", but no English speaker would ever say "X is different of Y".
Or so I thought — but COCA has 72 hits for "different of". Most of them are from contexts like "different of course", but others seem genuine, like this one:
And in another, filmed by Mecklem in 1997, Roman shares an appreciation for the "slowness" of painting, in both the creation and appreciation of it. "You can look at it hundreds of times over the years and you can eventually eke out something, some meaning out of it," he said. "That type of attitude is so different of the mega-visual culture that we have of just quick cuts… It would be good to bring back the activity of painting, of observing painting, and appreciating painting."
French de can also be English "from" ("Il arrive de Paris" = "He's coming from Paris"), or "for" ("L'élève a sauté de joie" = "The student jumped for joy"), or other things.
And French à?
English translations include
- "to" ("Allons à Paris" = "Let's go to Paris"),
- "in" ("Nous vivons à Philadelphie" = "We live in Philadelphia"),
- "on" ("à la carte" = "on the menu")
- "by" ("louer à l'année" = "rent by the year")
("goutte à goutte" = "drop by drop") - "with" ("La poésie grecque commence à Homère" = "Greek poetry begins with Homer")
("se battre à l'épée" = "fight with swords")
And also often nothing, including compounding:
- "au secours!" = "help!" (not "*to the help!")
- "sauce à pizza" = "pizza sauce"
- "vache à lait" = "milk cow"
Moving across languages and dialects, one of the hardest things is learning where to use what prepositions and cases and structures. Sometimes this seems to be because there are subtle differences in meaning, but it's also sometimes because morphosyntax is only quasi-regular.
J.W. Brewer said,
October 7, 2025 @ 6:44 am
I find the "different of the mega-visual culture" phrase extremely bizarre and jarring, yet googling indicates that the late Roman Scott, who uttered it (unless, of course, it's a mistranscription ..) was born the same year I was and was like me born and raised in the U.S. with no reason to suppose he wasn't a fully-fluent speaker of AmEng. So a useful reminder that there may be more variation in ones own L1 than one is often conscious of. (He grew up in a different part of the U.S. than I did, so I suppose it could be a regionalism, but we'd need more data before we could start drawing isoglosses on the map.)
J.W. Brewer said,
October 7, 2025 @ 7:05 am
To repeat a variation of a point from a recent prior thread: With respect to "the" French preposition à, part of the issue is that etymologically what happened is that two distinct Latin prepositions with close to opposite core meanings (ab and ad) evolved into homophones and homographs after losing the consonants which had distinguished them. Whether French dictionaries should list these as two different prepositions which are homophones/homographs or as one with two different core senses (plus lots of extended ones) is for the French lexicographers to sort out to their own satisfaction, I suppose.
Yves Rehbein said,
October 7, 2025 @ 8:48 am
Rebracketing or accent retraction differen' to, different o', of. In contrast, «différent à» seems to be locative 'in', 'on', because grammar works differently in other languages, on the Seine.
Whereas upper German locative ob is cognate with uopn (Tyne) and central German uff, it is but ab as also in Latin absurd which is cognate to off of; whereas Latin obobsolete properly means 'towards', whereas German ob and cognate if (or else) are contracted from *jabai; whereas by, be-, *bai is how we point out the difference be tween things (in German "der Unterschied bei mir, uns, ist …") and be-heading clearly implies 'off'; twi-, two, di-, bi- involve buccalization in Romance, and its not certain if with(er) is related but it certainly meant both 'against' and and in some sense 'by' (the difference with you and me is …). Alot of the difference comes down to prosodic as well as lexical stress and such things.
Robert Coren said,
October 7, 2025 @ 9:46 am
As you suggest by the example of French à, correspondences among prepositions in different languages tend to be irregular and inconsistent. Consider also German zu Hause, which means "at home", although stand-alone zu would normally be glossed as "to".
Y said,
October 7, 2025 @ 11:41 am
Spatial prepositions vary even between two different varieties of Western U.S. English.
David Marjanović said,
October 7, 2025 @ 12:06 pm
That means "whether", but the form you're looking for is similar: oben.
That's the cognate of up and Upper & Standard German auf ("up", "on", "onto"). As usual, location with dative, direction with accusative.
I don't think German vowels do that.
No, *bi simply.
Der Unterschied ist, dass bei mir/uns…
Der Unterschied: Bei mir/uns…
"The difference: over here it's A, over on your side it's B."
"The difference between us" is der Unterschied zwischen uns.
Andrew McCarthy said,
October 7, 2025 @ 12:35 pm
I'm reminded of this Language Log post from 2013, about a (presumably) L1 German-speaking pilot who told his passengers in English "Welcome at Cologne Airport."
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7476
Robot Therapist said,
October 7, 2025 @ 4:01 pm
And I wince every time the train guard says "we are now arriving into Clapham Junction". Arriving into?
Mai Kuha said,
October 7, 2025 @ 4:57 pm
Ismo reveals the role of nudity in the semantics of English prepositions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK-P6pWWQJA
AntC said,
October 7, 2025 @ 6:49 pm
Well I'll be … I tried to answer my own question in the post myl has taken my comment from. According to Google ngram (and which might say more about my inability to drive it)
* 'untethered' was almost unknown until about the 1980's
* 'untethered from', 'untethered to' rose neck-and-neck until about 2010
* thereafter, 'untethered from' raced ahead, as of 2022 has about double the occurrences
[2022 is the limit of data, so won't reflect appearances in this week's news stories.]
Michael Watts said,
October 7, 2025 @ 7:05 pm
I would say that "untethered to" forces the sense of un- in which something has never happened or is not the case. If you are untethered to reality, it is not the case that you are tethered to reality.
"Untethered from" forces the other sense of un-, in which something was the case, and then somebody reversed it. If you have come untethered from reality, you used to be tethered to reality, but then something changed.
This is an example of a type of ambiguity I'm particularly fond of, where there are two different ways to understand something, but both of those ways end up meaning the same thing.
stephen said,
October 7, 2025 @ 9:41 pm
J. W. Brewer:
the late Roman Scott, who uttered it (unless, of course, it's a mistranscription ..) was born the same year I was
Wikipedia doesn't tell who Roman Scott was, and a web search finds a young man who is apparently someone else. Could you please tell us about him? Thanks.
Philip Anderson said,
October 8, 2025 @ 1:33 am
@stephen
Googling the quote gives me this: https://www.oregonlive.com/clackamascounty/2017/04/late_artists_moby_dick_mural_f.html
After Language Log that is.
Thomas said,
October 8, 2025 @ 4:09 am
In my experience learning languages, prepositions are practically cases in disguise. French nouns have no cases? Who cares if you need to remember the usage of a dozen prepositions. In any case, English of and from are a notoriously difficult pair for language learners.
Daniel Deutsch said,
October 8, 2025 @ 5:30 am
A personal favorite is “da” in Italian, which can mean from, to, at, through, since, beginning, by, for, in, of, or like.
https://www.wordreference.com/iten/da
Robert Coren said,
October 8, 2025 @ 9:00 am
@Daniel Deutsch: And it's taken me a while (and I'm still not sure I've completely gotten it) to understand the distinction between da and di/de.