Re: Does learning a conlang make learning a foreign natlang easy? Mayb

[CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!BRADFORD.AC.UK!C.J.Fine>]

> >  Russian has
> >  some odd interactions between its prepositions and the words they
> >  identify; some words take "na"; others "v", but both apparently mean
> >  "to" - you just have to learn which goes with which.
>
> With the prepositional case _v_ means {ne'i} and _na_ means {re'o},
> and with the accusative they both mean {mo'i} the same place, but
> there is a large number of nouns for which you'd have to memorise
> which preposition is used.  Why does US English have "on the street"
> where UK English has "in the street"?

and Russian "na ulitse" (re'o)?

Seriously, though, anybody that has explored a number of NL's, even
closely related ones, knows that the specific use of prepositions (or
equivalent) is about the most idiosyncratic feature of individual
languages.  And there's usually no trick other than getting down and
learning them. Sometimes the distinctions make more sense than those of
another language, sometimes less, but you usually can't predict them.

		kolin