this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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Prepositions are probably one of the parts of speech that is the hardest to translate in any language.
I learned Swedish as a second language, and it feels like "at", "for", and "on" are completely randomly interchanged, even though each word has a direct translation and both Swedish and English are Germanic languages at their core. There are multiple forms of "to" in Swedish too.
The "usage notes" section for the Swedish word for "On" is an experience lol
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/p%C3%A5#Usage_notes
Luckily, they're also the most forgiving part at any speech of mistranslate.
It’s no wonder doctors in linguistics dip into philosophy as often as they do, incredible minds to know enough languages to study them. Polyglots are cool