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Re: Tho (was: Blandness (was: Uusisuom's influences))

From:Robert Hailman <robert@...>
Date:Thursday, April 19, 2001, 22:22
Andreas Johansson wrote:
> > Robert Hailman wrote:
<snip>
> > > >It depends what follows the "but". When I saw that literally it meant > >"Taken by itself", I thought it's eqivalent to "In and of itself": > > Probably, tho' I'm not personally familiar with that English expression. The > LITERAL meaning of "i och för sig" is "in and for itself". German "an und > für sich" is litarally something like "at/on and for itself". Eek, why can't > langs so close to each other have prepositions with an 1-1 correspondence > ... ?
Given those meanings, I'd say that "In and of itself" is the English equivalent, although I don't know how common it is - it's fairly common in my speech, but I won't claim to represent the majority of English speakers. It has the same use as the Swedish and German meanings, at any rate. Hmm... I wonder what the phrase is in other Germanic languages? <snip> -- Robert