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From: Athel Cornish-Bowden <acornish@imm.cnrs.fr>
Newsgroups: alt.usage.english
Subject: Re: Soup - eat, drink, sip or just 'have'
Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2022 19:24:38 +0200
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On 2022-07-23 15:50:22 +0000, Garrett Wollman said:

> In article <tbgc5m$3otft$1@dont-email.me>,
> Anders D. Nygaard <news2012adn@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> We have a similar confusion in Danish. Some people will insist that
>> saying "på Island" (on Iceland) instead of "i Island" (in Iceland)
> 
> [...]
> 
>> The linguists' conclusion is that preposition usage is utterly
>> ideosyncratic in Danish. I imagine that the situation is similar
>> in English.
> 
> Similarly, in Finnish, some places (like Venäjä [=Russia], or Tampere
> [a city in south-central Finland]) use the allative/adessive/ablative
> cases, rather than the more usual illative/inessive/elative trio.
> There's no apparent rhyme or reason to it; the same newscasters who
> say "Venäjällä" today, used to say "Neuvostoliitossa" when it was the
> Soviet Union.  Just one of those things language learners have to
> memorize.
> 
> I remember a simular issue in French where masculine countries used
> "au" (a contraction of "à" + "le") whereas feminine countries used
> "en" -- you had to say "en France" (not *"à la France") but "au
> Canada".

The complication also applies to cities with names beginning with A: I 
was led to belive that one should say "en Avignon" and "en Arles", but 
I understand that the current recommendation is to say "à Avignon" and 
"à Arles". A silly change, and more difficult to say, if you don't like 
hiatuses, as French speakers, on the whole, don't. Probably it's the 
same with names that begin with other vowels: do we say "à Evry" or "en 
Evry"? I don't know.

>  That's not quite so idiosyncratic other than the usual issue
> in Romance languages of having to know what gender is arbitrarily
> assigned to various nouns.
> 
> (Please be kind, both Finnish and French are more than 30 years in the
> rear-view mirror for me.)
> 
> -GAWollman


-- 
Athel -- French and British, living mainly in England until 1987.