You’re thinking in terms of location, rather than state-of-being. “I’m home” is your status.
“I’m driving, I am bored, I’m safe, I am away”… None of those sound weird, do they? This, combined with the more technical grammar rules others have commented…
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Home is the adjective. It’s a state of being.
Many times I’ll walk in the door but need to log into work, and I’ll say to my wife “I’m not home yet”. As in, my external responsibilities are not completed and I am not available. When I’m available to my family or to relax, I have then become “home”.
Edit: I meant adverb. It modified the state of being. Like being “away”.
Home is used differently than house. I’m home makes sense. I’m house doesn’t (which is your school and post office equivalent).
Also, I feel at home but I don’t feel at house.
Dude, I am so post office.
For me it always just felt very close to “I am here” / “I am done” / “I am late” / “I am fine” — not as description of a place but state.
All the quirks, weirdnesses and exceptions are the best / most fun parts of any language. Close second, how it constantly evolves and where the words originated from.
This is it exactly. “I am at home” describes your location. “I am home” describes your current state.
I had to explain to a friend recently why
“I’m at Steve’s house”
Was fine but
“I’m in Steve’s house”
Was weird. Like, get out of there before you get arrested.
That reminds me that my sixth grade teacher was adamant that 'I am going over Steve’s house" meant that one was visiting the house, not flying over it.
I like learning french because it shows me how weird the connections to english are.
“Chez Steve” means “At Steve’s [place]”. This one is more verbose in english.
But you can say “chez moi” for “at home”. And no need to specify which home.
How many homes do you have?
That’s exactly my point.
I would sure appreciate that explanation. Like I broadly get that ‘at’ implies you are present with the person’s knowledge while ‘in’ implies you are there without their knowledge but I would like an explanation of why the meanings are implied as such
Because home isn’t a normal location, it’s “home”.
It’s where you’re from.
Like, no one says “I’m house” or “I’m apartment building” because it’s not about the physical structure. It’s about being where the heart is. How many pillows do Grandmas need to stitch that on?
Your instincts are right in that English as a second language is tricksy and annoying. The “I’m home” thing never occured to me, but there’s plenty of stumbling blocks. They’re, their, and there. Idioms like “piece of cake”. It’s a long list. Not the hardest of all languages to learn, but it is confusing in places.
In Hungarian it’s the same with “home” in particular. You say “I’m home.”. In Hungarian, I too say the exact same thing: “Otthon vagyok” (I’m home).
Your other two example works the same, you won’t say in Hungarian “I’m school” (Iskola vagyok (it means I am literally a school)). But you say “IskoláBAN vagyok” (I’m at school) or “PostÁN vagyok” (I’m at the post office. Notice the suffix in this case is completely different, but that’s another story of Hungarian)
Yup, probably something that is the same in many languages though I can only speculate. It’s also the same in swedish any way.
Can confirm for German (“das Zuhause” - “ich bin Zuhause”)
Confirming for Romanian:
- house = casă
- home = acasă
- i’m home = sunt acasă
- i’m at school = sunt la şcoală
Home is probably special :)
okay, so this means the word ‘home’ is actually special accross languages 😆.
and not neccessairly the home as homeland like haza in hungarian ('cause that’s not even a noun (tho it is somewhat equivalent with home)), home like… your home.
In Hungarian it comes from literally combining “ott” (there) + “honn”/“ház” (house/home). “itthon” is the same way except with “itt” (here).
Yeah, though I was like this is some behind the scenes or dvd extras material for this thread :P
Yes it does. I think it’s that way because it’s in locative case even though it doesn’t make the word itself look any different. English sort of has cases and doesn’t.
It works similarly in Latin. You don’t say ad domum. You only say domum.
No, the way people say it makes it obvious that it’s a set phrase. Like in Japanese they say “tadaima” and people reply “okaeri” and you just know that it’s a thing and don’t question it much. It’s until much later when people point it out that you go, ohh yeahhh.
honestly I never even noticed that. But I did learn English like a native would - through near total immersion, and mainly monolingually instead of through translation. Whenever I learnt something new I was just like “alright so that’s how I say the thing”.
To be perfectly honest, if your language teacher points out that “I’m home” is a unique case I’d say that’s a bad move, because now you’ll second guess yourself every time you want to say it & might make mistakes you otherwise wouldn’t.
This goes for all linguistic quirks imo, so many “watch carefully for those little bits” that instead of helping you learn they make you confused. Imagine learning about through thought though taught tough throughout thorough all in one day because “they’re all very similar but very different! we put them all in the same spot to make sure you don’t get them confused :)” it’s a mental cluster fuck trying to remember which is which when you have all of them in one spot, the way to learn them is to have examples of their uses scattered across the ciriculum so that when you encounter one you can commit it to memory before you see the next one
When was the meeting where we decided not to say “I’m post office” because I use that phrase daily?
I am back.
I am home.
I am out.
I am office. 🤔
adverb
adverb
adverb
noun
I remember a Vietnamese co-worker commenting that sometimes people say “Here you go” and sometimes they say “Here you are” when handing her things and wondered if there was a difference. I explained it was just two ways to say the same thing.
Also “going to 'ospitol”
