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

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