There’s some confusion about the uses of “at” and “by”, particularly among those for whom English is a second language. Prepositions often cause trouble, because they don’t translate perfectly. Nonetheless, it’s important to know that in standard English, if someone is staying home, they’re staying at home, not by home. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “At vs. By”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, how are you?
Doing well. Who is this?
This is Hannah Perkin calling from Denver, Colorado.
Well, welcome to the show. How can we help you?
Okay, well, I’m hoping you can help myself and my 9th and 10th grade students.
Oh, another teacher. I love having the teachers on the show. Where do you teach?
I teach at Beth Jacob of Denver, which is a religious Jewish high school here in Colorado.
And we have a bit of a dilemma that we’d like you to help us solve if you could.
Oh, okay, great.
The school that I teach in has an international student base.
We’ve got girls from the United States, Mexico, Israel, Canada, Costa Rica, Russia, pretty much you name it, they go.
And so the language base is enormous.
Because in addition to the languages that they speak from their countries, they also usually speak Hebrew or a little bit of Yiddish.
And I’m getting used to, when I mark papers, you know, different things that transfer from languages into English when they translate it.
But there’s one thing that I’ve seen across the board with almost every girl.
They all switch the word at with the word by.
For example, they’ll say, I’m going to be by someone’s house overnight, as opposed to I’m staying at someone’s house.
Or I’ll see you by school, as opposed to I’ll see you at school.
And we keep telling them, if you say bye while you’re standing outside all night in the snow, you’re not actually getting into the building.
But it’s not really sticking.
And I’ve found that I’ve spoken with other English teachers in other parts of the U.S. who teach Jewish students, and they say that it’s something that they have trouble with as well.
And we’re starting to wonder if it’s a Jewish language thing or if it’s something that all teenagers are doing and we’re just noticing it in our students.
What could be the reason for this?
Anybody who learns English has this problem, regardless of what their first language is.
Does that make sense?
Okay, with prepositions.
With prepositions.
Even if you had some Russian students come in who spoke only English as a second language and did not speak Hebrew or Yiddish, they would probably have this problem as well.
We have a problem when we do translations.
Mostly that’s what we do when we learn a second language.
We kind of translate in our heads.
And we try to find parallels from language A to language B, and prepositions don’t usually have a perfect one-to-one translation.
So what means by in language A might mean two or three things in language B, and the reverse is also true and it’s not just by and at.
From has a problem and to has a problem, and you can just go down the list of English prepositions and pretty much there’s a whole host of languages where when those speakers learn English, they’ve got a problem with it.
But Hannah mentioned Yiddish.
And this is what I’m thinking might be the key.
Because the word by in Yiddish, like if you say by mir, which means literally by me, it can mean to me.
It can be with me.
It can be in my opinion.
It can be in my house or in my circle.
I’m wondering if it’s the Yiddish influence.
It’s a great example, though, of the imperfect translation into English.
Are many of them Yiddish speakers?
That’s really what my problem was, because at first I thought, well, it must be that they’re translating, like you said, either literally from their native language or possibly from Hebrew, because that’s really what most of the girls would speak, and not so much from Yiddish.
But then I realized even my native English speakers, the ones that are coming from the U.S., grew up in Denver or grew up, you know, in different places in the U.S. or Canada, also have this problem.
And that was something left over from possibly the Yiddish that their parents and grandparents thought.
I don’t know.
Or their peers.
It’s possible.
Or their peers.
Yes, I was going that direction.
Even English speakers aren’t in perfect agreement about which prepositions should be used in particular circumstances.
There was a survey that was done for the Linguistic Atlas of England.
They wanted the survey takers to respond to a question that said, if you stay blank home, what do you put in the middle?
Do you stay at home?
Most people chose at home, but a lot of people chose by home.
And some people said they don’t stay, they stop home.
They stop at home or they stay by home.
And I believe the same thing is true in the United States and Canada and other parts of the English-speaking world.
Where there’s a lot of variance among native English speakers who do not speak another language and don’t have any recent history of having heard another language from parents or grandparents.
Well, here’s the really big question that the girls wanted to know.
Yes.
Based on everything we’ve just said, do they get marked off for this?
Yes.
I should take off points?
Yes, you should.
Because you want to teach them the best English that will present them at their best to the world at large.
You’re not running a class saying, I’m going to teach you how to talk street English.
You’re teaching them formal, professional, sophisticated English that they can speak to a parent or grandparent or a boss or a religious leader with and not be embarrassed because they’ve said something that’s kind of too informal for the situation.
Right.
And if they’re educated…
That’s what I thought.
Yeah.
They should be able to switch.
They can speak that with their peers.
That’s fine.
But in a formal situation.
So your job as a teacher is always to teach them the best English that you can.
All righty.
Thank you so much.
All right. Bye-bye.
Bye.
