Preposition problems

Like most of you, I spend a lot of time thinking about prepositions and other parts of speech. When we first got here, we got some German training from my company. One thing the instructor said was that from language to language, prepositions are pretty much randomly assigned their meanings. My first instinct was to rebel against that claim, thinking that English had it right and that it was just the Germans who were messed up. But upon further reflection, I realized that he's right.

Let's use the word "by" for example. German doesn't have a preposition that's equivalent to our "at." They use other prepositions to convey the same idea. In English, I would say "I work at Thomson." In German, though, I would say the equivalent of "I work by Thomson." (The German word is bei.) At first blush, it seems like the Germans, having failed to invent the word "at," just had to grasp at straws and finally use "by" out of desperation. But let's look at the English word "by."

Here are three valid sentences: "I am standing by Tom." "This book was written by Tom." "By any measure, Tom did well." What the heck is going on? We've used the word "by" in three completely different ways that have nothing to do with each other. Apparently, a few hundred years ago, somebody just grabbed the nearest preposition, which at the moment happened to be "by," and threw it into those three sentences seemingly at random.

Let's try the word "on." The Germans have two different words for "on." "The picture is hanging on the wall" uses a different "on" from "The cat is on the table" (an and auf). But English isn't much better. "The cat is on the table." "Turn on the television." "We're going to the store on Thursday." Good luck trying to explain the sense in that.

And if you want to move beyond prepositions, try to wrap your mind around how we use "going": "I am going to the store." "I am going to shoot you." Non-English speakers really struggle with those two different instances of "going."