I still don't get what "fill out" really means. Is the meaning the same as that of "fill in"?
In most cases, yes. In fact, in virtually all of the examples given in this thread of "filling out" and "filling in," you could leave out the preposition entirely and just say "filling," and your meaning would be just as clear.
Fraggle, you always talk about Chinese being a language with only nouns and verbs. Here is something I don't understand. How do you express things like "therefore", "so", "thus", and so on? They are not nouns or verbs right?
Those are conjunctions (although "thus" behaves more like an adverb and also has a second meaning in which it is an adverb, just to confuse you), which we haven't covered, and they are difficult to explain. Let's start with prepositions first, which are the original subject of this thread.
Prepositions express relationships, and all prepositions still have one ancient, fundamental meaning that describes a physical relationship. For example, "I am in the house," or "I am at home," describes my physical relationship with my house. In Chinese, I say this using only nouns and verbs:
Wo zai jia li, literally, "I occupy the house's interior."
We could, of course, say the same thing in English, but it takes too long. Chinese is a more phonetically compact language for a variety of reasons; one is that it has almost no meaningless "noise words" like "the," and another is that it has no inflections and lets a very rigid word order serve their function, so I'm actually saying "I occupy house interior," in just four syllables. Note that I could just as easily (and in many cases just as compactly) say "I occupy house roof," or basement, or garden, or bedroom, or driveway. The syntax of the language invites me to be more precise without having to expend a lot of energy on extra syllables. If it's truly not important to tell you what part of the house I'm located in, I can just say
Wo zai jia, "I occupy house."
Let's take a more complicated example. "I went TO school ON the bus AFTER breakfast." Three prepositions, and only one of them (after) actually adds any meaning to the sentence. The other two are just placeholders, or noise words. In Chinese you say "I eat breakfast ride bus attend school." Once again, the rigid word order makes prepositions unnecessary, by clearly stating the order in which the three actions took place. And BTW if it's important to specify that I did this yesterday, or every day for a year, I'd just toss in two more syllables for "yesterday" or four more for "every day last year," instead of letting you guess what my use of the past tense implies. (Chinese has no tense, number, gender, etc., always begging you to be precise and always making it rather easy to do so.)
Conjunctions are harder to explain because the nouns and verbs used to express those relationships are customarily translated as conjunctions rather than nouns and verbs, and also my command of the language is not sufficient to give you literal translations. But where we would say "therefore," they say something like "it follows," and where we would say "because," they say something like "the reason is." Remember that these constructions are not as cumbersome in Chinese as in English and generally only use two one-syllable morphemes.
Over here we fill in or fill out a form, the latter I suspect being American usage which we have adopted.
We "fill in the blanks" in a crossword puzzle, and we even use the same phrase as an idiom for solving a mystery.
Your reference to French remids me that all there is not plain sailing for foreigners. As every beginner knows, "sur" translates as on. When a Francophone uses sur, it can have other meanings as well. For example, the idion, "nous sommes sur le meme bateau" can also be rendered as "dans le meme bateau", this latter being more common . You may know Debussy's " Petite Suite en Bateau". Hows that for confusion? " Dans " normally translates as in but a Frenchman will say I took it "dans" the drawer , where we would say from.
As I have often noted, French is surprisingly similar to English in many of its attributes. One is its nearly totally useless prepositions. Another is its phonetic compactness, rivaling English (among the languages I'm familiar with) for being second to Chinese; it has a lot of one-syllable words and a lot of contractions. Another is its huge paradigm of phonemes and a tendency to juxtapose them in almost any combination, making pronunciation difficult to learn. Finally there's the grammar, which is nothing but a collection of relics from an ancestral language that have no logic to them anymore.
As we both agree, the only way to get to grips with prepositions is by reading, and listening to native speakers. One day, when I am in the mood, I shall run through Irish prepositions. My instinctive feeling is that we have less of a muddle than one finds in English.
If it has the set of only twenty or thirty prepositions that typify the Indo-European languages, it would be hard for it to be any less confusing and ambiguous.
I would suggest that fill in and fill out can be considered interchangeable but, on balance I would recommend "fill out "because this can be used in the US and in the UK.
No one will be taken aback if you say "fill in a form" in the US. I recommend learning the proper idiom for the country in which one will live and not striving for a transnational dialect of English, which does not exist, and will identify you as a foreigner everywhere you go.
I would guess as to the difference between fill in and fill out, although the net result is the same. However in other contexts they may not both be used. Example: a pretty girl fills out a bathing suit - fills in seems peculiar. On the other hand: a manager fills out a roster for a ball game - a player fills a position (no in or out), but could fill in for another player.
In all but the last example, you could omit the preposition and make perfect sense. In the last one, you're leaving out the noun that would bring in the sense: filling another player's
position on the team, in which case speaking more clearly makes the preposition unnecessary.
My native language is Mongolian.
Does Mongolian have prepositions?
My bridge to English was Russian which I used for a decade.
That is a very difficult bridge! From our perspective, English and Russian have very little in common. Their relationship is as distant as the relationship between two Indo-European languages could possibly be.
) but I’m sure there aren’t more than thirty. But worse, most of these originated in our ancestral proto-Germanic language, back in the Stone Age of the diaspora of the Western Indo-European tribes, when many of the most important concepts, objects, activities and relationships we need to talk about didn’t even exist yet.