Prepositional Predicament

This is the name I myself gave to a piece I read in a magazine this morning. Here is the piece itself:

For a variety of reasons, learning English prepositions is notoriously difficult and a slow, gradual process for English as a Second Language (ESL) students. To begin, English prepositions typically are short, single-syllable or two-syllable words that are seldom stressed when speaking and therefore often not articulated clearly or heard distinctly. Another problem is that prepositions are often conceptually different from one language to the next, and direct translation cannot be relied on. For example, in English “we walk in the rain,” whereas in French we “walk under the rain (marcher sous la pluie).” Both formulations seem to make the same intrinsic sense; however, it would strike most English speakers as odd to say that we walk under the rain! This lack of correspondence means that a one-to-one translation will produce an ungrammatical sentence.
These difficulties are compounded by the loose grammatical rules governing the use of English prepositions. For example, one rule states that the prepositions at, on, and in are used to designate expressions of time. However, these very same prepositions also designate expressions of place and location, which often makes the selection of a preposition a matter of guesswork. The uncertainty about what preposition to use even extends to differences within British and American English. For example, in British (and South African) English it is common to speak of “filling in a form,” while American English speaks of “filling out a form.” The problem is further exacerbated by regional or social varieties of English that use prepositions in idiosyncratic ways. Then there are those unhelpful (even archaic) rules about prepositions that continue to hold sway, such as the rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition. As Winston Churchill tellingly joked, “The rule which forbids ending a sentence with a preposition is the kind of nonsense up with which I will not put.”

Ali,

Your question is interesting: how did I get on with literature - with my love of literature, and how did this happen as early as it seems to have happened. Actually, it did happen very early, but I can't pinpoint a single magical moment that started it all. There have been a few such "moments" in my early life. In fact, quite a few. I remember an aunt telling me good-night stories that I listened to with rapture, but that happened before I knew how to read. I think I had mentioned to you before - in an e-mail - that the first book I may have read from cover to cover (when I was still in first-grade) was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. As a matter of fact, I am not really sure of that either (though, of course, if it's true, what I read was a Hungarian translation of that great American fairy tale). There was another novel-length fairy tale that I remember reading around that same time. It was a book by the Hungarian Elek Benedek. And I remembered the title (in English) as The Enchanter. This turns out not to have been the actual title. It wasn't until I was 43 and visited my father in Hungary that I told him how I could never find that book again. Well, the book has a longer title, and now I have the copy that my father gave me at the time I am talking about now. In fact, just recently I have started to translate the whole book into English. These episodes are examples of my early love of reading. But perhaps the most interesting story is as follows:

When I was still in first grade, I happen to have misread the title of a book lying on a bench in the hallway of our apartment in Budapest. My favorite uncle - my mother's younger brother - witnessed this and assumed that I had some kind of problem with reading. So he made me read five pages of Don Quixote every day thereafter, and when he came back from work, he would have me recite the events covered in those five pages on a daily basis. I must have done this all right, because my uncle soon gave up on testing me any further. And after that I was on my own. I guess that having to recite the parts of the plot of Cervantes's great novel (perhaps still the greatest novel in the West) every afternoon for a time was my entry into the world of literature.

But perhaps the most important part of this whole story is that thus, early in life, I absolutely fell in love with the magic of words. They can say so much about the human heart (and mind and soul). To this day I am an avid reader - a lover of poems and plays and stories and novels and even of movies. When the mind and the heart work together to respond to the best that people are capable of saying with words, there is suddenly always magic in the world greater than which there is none.

Your essays

Steve,
I can not wait to see your essays on this blog site. Life without thought is not life. It is merely an existance equivalent to that of solids and, at best, plants. Your essays and everything you write, in general, throw one's thoughts on the roads which are so enjoyable to go.
Thank you for sharing the fruits of your life with us.
And there is just one question I would like to ask you now: How have you obtained such an early, profound love for literature and whatever it relates to? Did your mother have anything to do with it? I think there must be a great lesson for educational systems and for families in this.

T

I am here again . . .

Hello Everyone!

I am here again. I thank my good friend Ali for saving some older posts from another blog where I was an active participant along with him. He was clever enough to save some of my blogs from there on Emily Dickinson's poetry, as well as some blogs about the use of English and some of the difficulties that people encounter when they are learning the language. I know about such difficulties, because I had experienced them myself. So, here is a bit about me:

I was born in Hungary. My mother and I left a few days short of my 16th birthday, after the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956 - which was an uprising against the Soviet Union and its domination of Eastern Europe. After spending a few years in refugee camps and schools in Austria, I came (with my mother) to the United States early in 1959, when I was 18 years old, going on 19. I began to learn English in earnest as soon as we arrived in New York City. In less then a year's time - and by then we were living in Cleveland, Ohio - I took my first class in English Composition at the Western Reserve University (today it's called Case Western Reserve University). From then on the history of my higher education took a dip and then went on with flying colors until in the year of 1974 I finally received my Ph.D. in English from the Johns Hopkins University. By then I was an assistant professor at a small liberal arts college in Southern Indiana. I am still living in Southwestern Indiana, even today, after my retirement from teaching.

These are the external facts of my life. The internal story is much more interesting. I became an avid reader early in my life. And never stopped. Once I acquired English, I began to read more and more books in English, until at last I began to teach courses in English and American literature. But saying this is still saying something about the external facts of my life. What lies beneath is an extraordinary love of literature - of poems and plays and stories and novels. And, of course, of all that relates to this life-long study, such as philosophy and theology and history and psychology - and/or whatever else can be related to stories and ideas. I have never ceased to have an undying curiosity about life and letters - much of which is about love, too. Love stories are still among my favorite kinds of stories.

So in my future contributions to this blog site, I shall come back with some brief essays that I hope those of you who are learning English in Iran, for example, will find both useful and enjoyable. I thank my friend Ali for having created this blog site, and I am looking forward to hearing from you, too, after this and/or my future postings.