Identifying function words

[ChenZheChina]

I like this avenue of investigation, to focus on finding "and", but depending on the language this may be more difficult - even if it's not a clitic. For example, in modern Turkish, "and" is expressed by ve, de, da, ile... There are also constructions with ister and ya, where those words also replace English and. And that's just after a superficial google search. This means that the relative frequency of each of these words will be lower than that of "and" in English.

That's not good. Why would one need so many different words to express the same logical operator?

Hi Anton,

The most simple answer is: “And” is sometimes not a logical operator.

Example:

• This is a secret between you and me.
  

The “and” above is not a logical operator, but a two-side connector.

It is imaginable that, when using simple dictionaries or translating engines, you will get many translations, because the dictionary / engine cannot tell what “and” you want exactly.

Besides, there are also other “and”s:

• My brother and I was going to talk with our father. (one-side connector, simultaneously)
  
• I’m going to travel to United States and Mexico. (one-side connector, sequentially)
  
• I’ll go and check what happened. (to check is the purpose of to go)
  
• …, and so on. (one-side connector, but may be replaced with other phrase, like etc, as whole)
  

And sometimes, different people might use different logical conjunction words in same / similar situation:

• It’s not their fault, but yours.
  
• It’s not their fault, and it’s yours.
  

It is totally possible that different languages have different ways to handle this.

In Chinese, if I want to say “relationship between countries”, I would say “国与国之间的关系”. The “与” here may also mean “and” in some other contexts. This is one of infinite examples where different languages handle logical operators differently.

I think these might be some of the reasons why Koen found many translations for one word.