Re:Esperanto is finding new life online
by agumonkey on Friday May 29, 2015 @06:41PM
(#9627951)
And current languages too. A while back I found this diagram http://imgur.com/ZNlwDUZ, to me it shows how logical greeks were. Terms are symmetrical, well organized, forming a tiny core of combinators.
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That diagram is great, but I'm not sure this sort of preposition inventory is that specific to ancient Greek. When I studied German, I feel like we had rather similar charts.
German has specific prepositions I recognize as equivalent to each main Greek preposition as defined in that chart, except maybe the distinction between εις and εν, which German would handle by a noun case distinction (ancient Greek εις την θαλασσαν → German ins Meer (accusative, < "in das"), ancient Greek εν τῃ θαλασσῃ → German im Meer (ablative, < "in dem"). German breaks up some meanings differently -- "among" is unter (shared with "beneath" rather than "between") -- but anyway there are other languages with a pretty nice set of prepositions!