So small and so weird

Several of my prior posts have noted a curious fact about French: for a Western language, it has some peculiar barriers to entry. For example, I wrote recently about how the most common greeting in French contains two sounds not found in English. This is why I always emit a little gargling sound after saying Bonjour.  I have no idea whether I'm fooling anybody with my "bonjouxhhh," but it doesn't get me funny looks, so I count it as progress.

Here's another: two of the most common stock phrases in the language contain certain words whose meaning is very hard to discern. And neither consists of more than two letters. What a poke in the eye!

Suppose you need to tell a French person that there is a bird in his or her hair. You'd say Il y a un oiseau dans votre cheveux. The first part of that, Il y a, is how you say "there is" or "there are." The il means "he" or "it." The single-letter word a means "has," which you learn fairly early in your French career, so its single-letterness is not all that offensive. Important! Here, a is not to be confused with à. À is a preposition that means generally "to" or "at." As far as I can tell, they're pronounced the same.

So far, we have "it has," as in "It has a bird in your hair." What's "it"? Well, it's general, and it's just how you say the phrase. The "it has" in il y a is no more or less arbitrary than English's "There is," Spanish's hay, or German's Es gibt ("it gives").

But what's that y in that phrase? Certainly not "and" as in Spanish. When you ask your French teacher, in the early days of French studies, what y means, he or she will get this funny facial expression and suggest talking about it when you're older, just like your mom and dad did when you asked where babies come from.

Here's a related mystery. When someone says Merci to you, the polite response is Je vous en prie. OK, let's take that one apart. "I you in... um, what?" So you go to the dictionary and find that prie is a form of the verb for "ask" or "request." All right, now we have "I, you, in, ask." If you thought maybe the reason nobody will tell you what y means because it's dirty, your mind is reeling at this point.

Now let me reel you back in. What I've just learned is that y and en (a different en, not the "in" one) are examples of a category of word we don't have in English. They are like prepositions in that they take the place of something previously said, but unlike the garden-variety prepositions, y and en must take the place of entire prepositional phrases.

Y always takes the place of à plus a noun. So, if a French person asked you if you wanted to go to Nîmes  you'd say Oui! Allons à Nîmes! or, more likely, just Oui! Allons-y! By the way, if you go to Nîmes, take some dang Febreeze. The place is a mess.

Similarly, en always takes the place of de plus a noun. The verb prier uses de to indicate the thing being asked for. So the entire stock phrase Je vous en prie, when deconstructed, means something like "I beg that you will do it." But really it means "You're welcome." Never mind how.

I feel so much better now that I know where all these dinky little words come from! Well, there's still one out there that's bugging me. I understand that, in some Slavic languages, z is a word. I can't even get started with that one.