Gaudete Sunday

[alixtii]

Apparently the rest of the East Coast had snow yesterday? We did not, although we had rain, and then wind.

Last night I went to ladyphoenixmage's graduation party. It was nice seeing her for the first time since before the semester, even if we didn't get to talk much. Finally gave her her birthday present (Godel, Escher, Bach). I missed my BFF.

Yesterday was also Preposition Day at languagelog. Check it out; I've been absolutely fascinated by prepositions for years. Not only are there the issues about stranding and pied-pipering and whatnot, which I love thinking about (you may have noticed?), but the relations they express between semantic units, the way we X to Y but A on B, seem so natural but are really so incredibly arbitrary (as anyone who's taken a foreign language quickly realizes).

Okay, I need to write my Nietzsche paper and my prettylightsfic fic by the end of the week, and then I have to write my 3_ships and work on my incompletes.

Comments

[alixnoorchis.livejournal.com]

Russian pronouns? Ridiculous.

They change depending on whether the thing your expressing relation to is inside or outside, which seems ok until you realize how vague that is. For instance, post office takes the "outside" preposition because the postal service was once people riding on horses outside. And "in" the Ukraine has a different preposition than all other countries because the Ukraine is "outside" of Russia.

Completely arbitrary, and sometimes I think the explanations for why this or that has a different preposition is made up half the time.