• Treeniks@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    Can’t speak of other languages, but in German anyway the sentence is exactly the same. “Ich bin zuhause” meaning word-for-word “I am home”. Same issue, normally a location would have a preposition and an article. Reasoning is also the same as in english, “home” and “zuhause” are not a location but a state in this case.

    • mindlesscrollyparrot@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 months ago

      Yes, “home” and “zuhause” mean the same thing but they aren’t exactly the same, zuhause is a compound word. English also has compound words, for example “aboard” and “abed”. The English word isn’t “ahouse”; it is simply “home”.

      • Treeniks@lemmy.ml
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        6 months ago

        True. I was more going on the idea of OP that it must confuse english learners. I often feel people who only know one language tend to forget that most latin languages tend to have similar quirks, often making such quirks in a foreign language rather natural.

        • wewbull@feddit.uk
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          6 months ago

          In this case, it’s nothing to do with Latin. German is not a Latin language, and old (pre-Norman) English is closer to German than anything else. It’s the shared Germanic heritage which gives us this quirk.

        • mindlesscrollyparrot@discuss.tchncs.de
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          6 months ago

          Absolutely. The fundamental thing about the rules of grammar is that they’re more like guidelines. In fact, I think OP’s example is hardly the most confusing or inconsistent thing in English, which is not to say that the question isn’t a really good one. The quirks, similarities and differences are one thing that makes language-learning really interesting.