One of my favourites to think about is “How are you?”. Taken literally that question makes no sense. “How are you?” “Well one day my parents had sex and I sort of grew from there…”
Not really, German here:
“Ich bin zuhaus(e)” -> “I’m home”
“Ich bin in der Bäckerei”, “Ich bin bei der Post”, “Ich bin bei den Großeltern” -> “I’m at the bakery”, I’m at the post office", “I’m at my grandparents place I’m at my grandparents” (or “I’m with my grandparents”)
Small correction:
“Ich bin bei den Großeltern” → “I’m at my grandparents (or grandparents’)”
“I’m at my grandparents’ place” only exist as “I’m at my grandparents‘ house” → “Ich bin im Haus meiner Großeltern”
In Hungarian it’s the same with “home” in particular. You say “I’m home.”. In Hungarian, I too say the exact same thing: “Otthon vagyok” (I’m home).
Your other two example works the same, you won’t say in Hungarian “I’m school” (Iskola vagyok (it means I am literally a school)). But you say “IskoláBAN vagyok” (I’m at school) or “PostÁN vagyok” (I’m at the post office. Notice the suffix in this case is completely different, but that’s another story of Hungarian)
In Hungarian it comes from literally combining “ott” (there) + “honn”/“ház” (house/home). “itthon” is the same way except with “itt” (here).
Yup, probably something that is the same in many languages though I can only speculate. It’s also the same in swedish any way.
Yes it does. I think it’s that way because it’s in locative case even though it doesn’t make the word itself look any different. English sort of has cases and doesn’t.
It works similarly in Latin. You don’t say ad domum. You only say domum.
