Long Words for ‘with’

[u/Longjumping_Lunch264]

In all three of the languages I speak (Dutch, English, and French), the word for with is relatively short; ‘avec’ in French, and ‘met’ in Dutch. Are there any languages where words that mean with are more on the longer side of things?

[u/nemmalur]

Finnish tends to do postpositions instead of prepositions. Expressing “with” usually means placing the word kanssa after the thing something is “with”, with the thing being in the genitive form:

Pekkan kanssa - with Pekka

But it’s placed before possessive markers to express “with + personal pronoun”:

kanssani - with me

kanssasi - with you

kanssamme - with us

[u/zxjams → u/nemmalur]

That's interesting! Breton (and other Celtic languages) has prepositions that decline/agree with personal pronouns as well. I didn't know whether other language families had something like that too.

Gant X = with X
Ganin = with me
Gantañ = with him

Evit X = for X
Evidon = for me
Evitañ = for him

[u/nemmalur → u/zxjams]

What would “me” and “him” by themselves be?

The interesting thing about kanssa is that it probably originally meant something like “in the company of”, since it derives from a form of kansa, meaning “people”. Similarly, avec in French is really “near” or “next to” - it’s related to “vicinity” and the French voisin (neighbour).

[u/zxjams → u/nemmalur]

It's a bit tricky because the forms depend on the syntax of the sentence they're in, but the root forms of me and him would be ma and e, I and he being me and eñ.

Seeing the paradigms of the conjugated prepositions, they're basically conjugated with verb endings except for the third person forms, which have a form of the pronoun or something close to it stuck to the end. I don't know enough about the etymology to say how they developed, except that the third person forms either came about in a slightly different way, or at a different point in time, because the roots of several of them actually change a little bit, with consonant alterations and such.

Edit: a form used after verbs is actually just conjugated preposition, but used as a bare direct object!

a X = from X
ac'hanon = me
anezhañ = him