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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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Why do we need the 'of' in ' take X out of the basket' but not in 'put X in the basket'?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I guess we've sort of elided over the "to" that many other languages maintain to indicate motion.
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Joined: Jan 2004
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journeyman
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journeyman
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Posts: 79 |
It's not just for motion though. Consider the following pair:
The widgerygrommet is in the basket
*The widgerygrommet is out the basket
It seems "in" can indicate either motion or static condition, but "out" can only indicate motion (except in a usage like "he is out (=not at home)")
I think there's a dialect difference for some prepositions - for me "off" is like "in" - "I lifted the coat off the floor" - where for (some?) Americans "off" is like "out" - "I lifted the coat off of (offa') the floor".
In Latin and German "in" and "out" can be used in either motion or static meanings, and you have to use different noun cases to show which it is. We learned it as "dumpy dative, active accusative".
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2000
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and, surely, it really OUGHT to be "take from the basket.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2001
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<<why do we need>>
We don't. Some take it out the dialect and don't bat an eye.
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veteran
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veteran
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Prepositions are just so darned quirky, that any question as to why or how is impossible to answer.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I agree with you about the quirkiness of prepositions, but do these two words in question function as prepositions?
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veteran
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veteran
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They seem as much a preposition as into. Then there are more problematic thingees like: outside, outside of, aside, aside from, on top of, except for, besides, &c.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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Sometimes it gets a little hard to tell the difference between prepositions and particles of phrasal verbs.
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,027 |
I guess we've sort of elided over the "to" that many other languages maintain to indicate motion.
I tend to think it's the opposite: "to" came to the rescue when the nouns' case endings disappeared in English. Even in Latin, "in" and "out" (ex) do not command the same case. But the Romans had their ablative to hand. In German, "to" is not needed because we still have the dative ("aus dem Korb" movement or no movement).
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