Grammar girl here. Over and over again, students who are learning English tell me how difficult

it is for them to learn prepositions. They ask questions such as, am I in a restaurant

or at a restaurant? It's frustrating, but I have to tell them that both are okay. In

some circumstances, the phrases can have different meanings. For example, if you're waiting

for someone outside a restaurant, you are at the restaurant, not in the restaurant. But

if you're inside, you can be both in or at denies.

Prepositions have a fascinating history in English. And to understand where they come

from, it helps to understand the concept of inflection. An inflection is a bit that's

added to the beginning, middle, or end of a word to convey additional meaning. For example,

the apostrophe S in English is an example of an inflection. It marks possession. Cole's

pen, with an apostrophe S on Cole's, means the pen belongs to Cole. Maybe your native

language has inflectional endings that serve the same role that many prepositions do in

English. Serbian, German, and many Native American languages, for example, are more inflected

than English. And Latin is also highly inflected. Well, it turns out that old English wasn't

inflected language. The word endings conveyed meaning, but during the transition to middle

English, nearly all the inflections were lost. Nobody knows why for certain, but scholars

speculate that it has to do with the difficulty of hearing the differences in pronunciation

between similar endings, such as on, and an, and the interactions between English speakers

and the Vikings, who spoke old Norse. When English lost its inflectional endings, people

still had to convey the meanings that the inflectional endings provided. So, during the middle

English period, people gradually started using prepositions instead. For example, according

to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English language, which I'll call SEAL from now on,

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