Re: Two meanings of "with"

Harlan Messinger wrote:

It occurred to me that in each of the Indo-European languages I know, the word for "with", whatever its derivation may be, covers both accompaniment ("The boy is with his mother." "I'm going with David.") and instrumentality ("He cut his fish with a knife.") This holds for German "mit", Spanish "con", French "avec", and Catalan "amb". I can see why there would be a connection between these two modes, but it also seems to me not to be a necessary one.

Does this merger appear outside of the IE family? Is it present in any languages where accompaniment and instrumentality are represented via inflection rather than via prepositions?

In both Mandarin and Hokkien, there are different words. For accompaniment, we have Mandarin <gen1> (literally "heel", thus "to follow", and on to "with) and Hokkien <kah1> (going back to preclassical Chinese in this meaning). Both of these are sometimes used where English would have "and", but also in contexts like, "I spoke with him." or "I told him blah-blah-blah."

For instrumentality, we have Mandarin <yong4> and its Hokkien cognate, <eng7>, meaning "use".

Japanese can use the postposition <to> for accompaniment, and the postposition <de> for instrumentality, but longer constructions may be possible, such as:

<{someone} to issho ni xxx> -- "(perform)xxx together with someone"

<{some object} (w)o tsukatte xxx> -- "(perform)xxx using some object"

Offhand, I can't think of any examples in Chinese or Japanese where the same term/construction might be used for both.

--
Mike Wright
http://www.raccoonbend.com
.

Relevant Pages

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    ... It occurred to me that in each of the Indo-European languages I know, the word for "with", whatever its derivation may be, covers both accompaniment ("The boy is with his mother." ... Is it present in any languages where accompaniment and instrumentality are represented via inflection rather than via prepositions? ...
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