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by wil421 1462 days ago
Off, as in take off your clothes or turn a light switch off. It’s means separation or disconnection.

Of shows a relationship. The Queen of the UK. Get rid of the mites on my face!

1 comments

Though note that etymologically "of" is a derivative of "off". There was no need for a preposition "of" historically because the idea was expressed by declining a noun into the genitive case. But as the Romance languages developed from Latin, the case system largely died out and the Latin preposition de radically shifted its meaning to the current meaning of "of".

Romance de was translated into English as off because that is the appropriate translation of Latin (but not Romance) de.[1] And, the senses being unrelated, of diverged from off.

[1] Actually, the conventional translation my Latin instruction used for de as a verbal prefix was "down from". (As in "descend".) As a preposition it has a few different uses, including "off", "down from", and "about" (as in "what's that book about?"). "From" more generally would be e or ex, but "down from" gets its own preposition.

English has too many words thanks to being ruled by the French. I think English has 170,000 vs French having almost 60,000.

For your point [1], I did like de when I studied Spanish in school.