mastronarde gives ‘epi + acc.’ preposition’s meaning as “onto, up to, toward; against”, but a few lines below, on the “examples of usage of these prepositions”, gives the translation of “epi makron khronon” as “for a long time” somehow. i just don’t get it. and not only that, in so many preposition examples mastronarde basically goes beyond the meaning he has given. i assume that, in this situation, these prepositions have no literal translation, even by giving a list of words like it may translate to as “onto, up to, toward; against”, but then how is it possible to understand a prepositional expression in a greek text?
and lastly, how should one study prepositions? i have memorized all the meanings that mastronarde has given, but it seems quite inadequate for learning prepositions. what should i do? (sorry for grammar mistakes if i have one, as i’m not a native speaker in english.)
The prepositions have basic meanings which more-or-less map onto those of English (or any other language), and you can learn these, as you have been doing. But when these prepositions are used with certain nouns they can form expressions with unpredictable meanings. You can only learn these by studying the vocabulary. To take your example, if you look up χρόνος in the lexicon you’ll see that it has a variety of uses with prepositions.
If you do a lot of reading you’ll frequently come across such expressions, and eventually you’ll remember them
Here’s the LSJ entry: https://logeion.uchicago.edu/χρόνος
thank you so much for your explanation.