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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

Prepositions are some of the least translatable bits of language. For that matter, even without translation they tend to get slippery within a language, especially over time (one that springs to mind is the whole “quarter of” referring to a time which I first encountered some 50 years ago and still don’t know if it’s quarter to or quarter after).¹

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1. Cue some dude to tell me in 3…2…1²

2. And this knowledge will promptly disappear from my brain five minutes later, sort of like the guy I knew in my 20s whose name was either Jack or Chad and to this date, I still am not sure, but I do know that every single time I called him by name, I got it wrong and it totally wasn’t on purpose even though he didn’t believe me.

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That's my cue!

I once had a Spanish teacher, who also had problems remembering what that kind of time specification stands for and I came up with maybe a trick to remember. We do the same thing in German, so I guess it translates:

Lets say you have 11:00. That's easy. But what about 11:15? We would say "quarter 12", so I guess the English version is "quarter of 12". How to memorize, that this is 11:15? Well, you can imagine a round clock and the minute pointer has moved _quarter of its way to 12_. So you only have a quarter of that hour "already done". 10:30? We say "half 11". So I guess English is "half of 11", meaning that the minute pointer has moved half the way to 11.

Maybe this will help.

(Actually I personally usually don't use those ways of specifying the time, neither in English nor in German. I just say the 24h format as it is written: "11:15" is "eleven fifteen", 13:35 is "thirteen thirtee five" not 1pm something.)

Whatever "quarter of 12" means in English, whether it's 11:45 (quarter to 12) or 12:15 (quarter past 12), it definitely isn't 11:15. We do fraction of an hour forward or backward relative to the hour mentioned, not fraction of an hour elapsed in approach to hour mentioned.

I recently encountered a German asking for the English phrase equivalent to bis unter, looking for a phrase like "up to below". There isn't one in common use. We just don't count things in equivalent ways.

Isn’t _bis unter_ akin to “just under”, or “right up to”?

I feel like either of those could work depending on the context and are common in English.

It is "up to but not including".

This is not great advice - the only way I have heard it in English would be "quarter past 11" to mean 11:15. Most people would just say "eleven fifteen".

If no one says it, did the post above mine just make things up and I am trying to explain their invented things?

You were just wrong. They explicitly gave the understood options as 15 before or 15 after. These are the options everyone uses in English -- not 45 before or a quarter of the hour before. In English no one says quarter of 12 to mean 11:15. You just explained it completely different from the ways it is interpreted in English. I understand the logic and how it might come about. Maybe it's very common in German, but it is not used that way in English. If you referred to 11:15 in that way to a native English speaker you would be misinterpreted.

This definitely doesn't translate - if you say "half 11" to a British person you are getting them at 11:30, not 10:30.

> Lets say you have 11:00. That's easy. But what about 11:15? We would say "quarter 12", so I guess the English version is "quarter of 12".

The English terms would be:

11:15 -> quarter after 11, quarter past 11 (both pretty rare, tbh)

11:30 -> half past 11 (this is the only form that is moderately common)

11:45 -> quarter of 12, quarter before 12 (also pretty rare)

And I'm pretty sure the Spanish matches (except in reverse, like Spanish usually is relative to English):

11:15 -> once y cuarto

11:30 -> once y media

11:45 -> doce menos cuarto

edit: and about the subject of the thread, "por sí" or "por sí mismo." "per" afaik is a preposition like "por" that means to pair or match things: so it can mean by, through, around, with, for, and even times("×") i.e. doesn't mean anything in English.

"si" is the 3rd person reflexive pronoun (when placed after the verb), and is probably similar to "se." ("mismo" is a redundant clarification is Spanish, probably because "si" and "sí" are homonyms.)

Se and si (as used here) are the same word in different cases. I would draw comparisons to latin se and sibi respectively. I'd also draw parallels between sui, suus, secum and suyo, su, consigo.

100% agreed. Also, 11:45 -> quarter TO 12 (rare)

I hear quarter to and quarter after a lot. I think rarity might be a regional thing (or perhaps generational—despite growing up four miles from my childhood home, my children have a different Chicago accent than I do and when I did student teaching in the school district where I went to high school, those kids also commented about the difference in accent).

Quarter to and quarter past are not rare in Britain, so

11:15 -> quarter past 11 11:45 -> quarter to 12

are very normal to me. In fact any number above 5 to or past are normal. Even smaller numbers come up, where, of course, 1 to 1 and 2 to 2 are particular favourites.

The "English" terms?

Can you please specify the dialect of English you're referring to, instead of falling for the obviously ridiculous notion that there's one English.

I have never heard "quarter of 12", and wasn't aware it was a thing. In Ireland - Hiberno-English, Irish-English, whatever you like - I've only ever said and heard "quarter to 12" for 11.45.

So, serious question: who says "quarter of 12"? It sounds makey-uppy and illogical, so I'm supposing it might be a linguistic development in the old U.S. of A. I don't feel like I've ever heard it in movies or shows though, in spite of having been subjected to a certain amount of U.S. cultural produce, so this is somewhat mysterious to me.

Please, someone englighten me!

> quarter of

Still can't beat stuff like "bi-weekly" which can mean "every two weeks" or "twice a week" or probably some other thing as well.

As is often the case, Randall Munroe has already delivered: https://xkcd.com/1602/. Perhaps the joke in this context would be if it said "bi-weekly".

"You should come to our Linguistics Club's bi-weekly meeting. Membership is open to anyone who can figure out how often we meet." (I mean, you have a 50-50 shot. I wonder if there's any personality insights one could learn from such a selection.)

yeah. for years, there's "biennial" (every 2 years) vs "biannual" (twice in 1 year).

no such luck w/ months or weeks.

also your username is almost as salient to the topic as mine! ;)

Fortunately, fortnightly exists :)

Tok Pisin, a.k.a. New Guinea Pidgin, has exactly two prepositions: bilong, which means "of" or "from" in a possessive or attributive sense; and long, which means everything else.

I have to admit that I was a bit surprised when my ex-wife listed off Spanish prepositions to discover that it excludes a lot of words I would have thought were prepositions but Spanish considers adverbs and only become prepositional when used in conjunction with one of the enumerated prepositions, usually (always?) de.

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