2383: Inflected Prepositions Jun 27, 2021

Mostly, inflection is thought of as relating to nouns or adjectives, but this process can also be applied to prepositions in certain languages such as those in the Celtic or Semitic families. For instance, the Welsh word meaning 'to him' is 'iddo', which broken down from 'i-' (to) with a special ending, whereas saying *i fe (to + him) would be ungrammatical. These types of words wherein a preposition is modified with person and case are found in very few languages but are seen in Hebrew and Arabic as well where a modified form derived of the personal pronoun can be added to a preposition. A handful of exceptional cases are found such as with Portuguese.

2254: Time & Space in Preposition Feb 16, 2021

There is a strong correlation between a forward direction physically as well as in time; the reverse is true with a backwards direction and the past. There are some exceptions as with in Aymara, but otherwise this is a (near-)universal rule. In Indo-European languages, this manifests not only in prepositions and adverbs (e.g. 'ahead'; 'forward'; 'backward'; toward; behind), but in prefixes. Many are indeed related to those examples before such as in 'fore-' from Old English and ultimately related to 'fare' from 'faran' (to go), along with other prepositions now like the Latin and Greek 'pro-', found in English. 'Before' is also related, and can relate to both time and space. More on this at a later point.

2111: Inconsistency of Prepositions Sep 25, 2020

Prepositions are considered to be in a closed lexical class, which essentially means it's very difficult to create new ones, unlike with nouns and verbs for which new words are created daily. This is because they indicate grammar more than meaning. Indeed, even though some prepositions like 'up', 'down', or 'on' and 'off' which seemingly have a consistent meaning aren't so consistent, such as how different dialects will say either "in line" or "on line" to refer to cueing. Another humorous example can be seen with

"The alarm went off, so I turned it off"*

This is also not to mention that translating prepositions is particularly difficult, because each holds so many varied meanings that the relations are not always one-to-one.

*(technically this is post-positive but they are classes as prepositions)

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