There is a funny little preposition in Latin, apud. It sometimes means 'next to' or 'with', but it's probably most often used to mean 'at the house of'. It shows up in the very first line of the Vulgate version of the creation story in the Christian biblical book of John, "in principio erat Verbum et Verbum erat apud Deum et Deus erat Verbum". That is, 'In the beginning there was a word and the word was at the house of God and God was the word', which is a curious thing to say in any language, but which captures pretty well the spirit of apud.
French also has a four-letter word for 'at the house of', and it's just a straightforward preposition: chez. It's so widely used that it shows up in the global restaurant business, like in the name of Chez Panisse, perhaps the most influential restaurant on the left Coast. There is a similar word in Catalan, can, which is used like a preposition with a person's name: can Jordi means 'at Jordi's place'. I think -- or at least my etymology dictionaries think -- that both French chez and Catalan can are from Latin casa 'home', or even from Catalan casa + the postposition en.
English doesn't have a word that works like this, but we do have the unambiguous construction at Wilbur's, where the possessive gets to stand for a place. I don't think at Wilbur's can ordinarily mean anything other than 'at Wilbur's place', although of course the place might be a house or a restaurant or a shop -- just like with chez and with can.
So what I'm currently wondering is if there are similar words in other languages. It feels like 家 works much like chez and can, although it also literally means 'home' -- the character is a pig under a roof, after all. Is there a word in Thai? A phrase in Swabian dialect? A Russian phrase?
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