Did you have to memorize prepositions in grade school? We did with Mrs. Gorman at Blessed Sacrament in Toledo. I love grammar. (My former students at SIHS, Cleveland, will remember my daily refrain: "I LUUUUUV words!")
In any case, today I learned (was taught is probably the better term) juu ya, on top off, on, upon, over. Omega, my teacher this week (more about him in a moment) and I got distracted because we started talking about prepositions in our languages. There was in our book a depiction of a child up in a tree. In Kiswahili, one uses juu ya -- on a tree. In English this would mean plastered on the trunk after an accident or standing on the tip top branch. Then "What about the road?" Omega asked. "'In the road' or 'on the road'?" It really got me thinking about these things, how remarkable language is -- and so much meaning in tiny crevices like prepositions.
Incidentally, Omega's brothers' names? Alpha, Delta, Epsilon.... I'm not joking. And, no, he doesn't call his father's mother Gamma (cue the rim shot).
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