Missing words: him, Jack and Jill revisited

English is slippery.  We leave words out.  Today I want to look at another missing word in Jack and Jill.  I asked friends who speak German to check the Google translation of the poem for me.  This is the result.

When I got this back, I noticed another word that had been missing from the original: him.

 

So the French would be this:

Of course, Google Translate is a computer dictionary working word for word; so, if you leave out a word in the English, as we often do, it leaves that word out too.

Of course the reason that 'him' was left out of this little poem was to preserve the rhythm and rhyme.  And we are expected to supply the understanding even without the missing word because the pattern 'after him' is so familiar.

The thing is that prepositions, which take nouns as objects, are often also adverbs that can stand on their own.  So, we don't notice that something is missing when they show up alone at the end of a sentence.  "Never end a sentence with a preposition." is the rule that comes down to us from scholars who study Latin.  When corrected on this issue, Sir Winston Churchill agreed with this response: "That is something up with which I shall not put."  A master of the English idiom, he knew that his grammatically 'correct' sentence is very un-English.  To be idiomatic, it would be "That is something I shall not put up with."  

Sometimes we get these collections of "adverbs" and wonder about them.  Here is what's going on.  Since English is a combination of French and German, we have developed a collection of verbs that use prepositions to create new meanings.  For example, 'run at the store' would result in a crash of some sort but 'run to the store' means a quick trip.  These prepositions are sometimes called adverbial particles.