Example: “by virtue of” is a prepositional phrase that uses the archaic sense of virtue as in “power.” On its own, virtue today means roughly the same thing as “integrity.” Greek, actually, has a similar expression but uses charis (grace) rather than arete (virtue).

Among English, Greek, German, and Hebrew: prepositions and other words strongly affect the meanings of verbs. It’s not that words have no meaning. It’s just that a word’s expected meaning may be suppressed or overwritten completely by the phrase it is found in. Often, though not always, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Idioms… for example, in Spanish…

“Hay que tener cuidado”

would literally be “There is that to have been cared” or something like that. In actuality, it means “Be careful!”

Thus, I have a saying for those of us who may be wound too tightly about literalness and formal equivalence (two values I prize highly):

“Hay que tener cuidado”

http://www.drhinternet.net/mw/display.php?M=1506089&C=d9446392906c7ab7f357939a9cc4d67c&L=6&N=1908

I love the drive-through window example.

And with “dangerous/endangered” in Hebrew, I could imagine some comical situations in a zoo based off that misunderstanding.

“‘On the other hand we wore our washing machine out.’

“The phrase ‘on the other hand’ has the internal structure of a preposition[al] phrase but functions as a conjunction syntactically and semantically. It is a fixed phrase in that it cannot be varied in any way. None of the constituent words can be replaced or inflected and no other words can be inserted in it. The phrase ‘washing machine’ is actually a compound noun. It can be pluralized, but otherwise is fixed. The phrase ‘wear out’ can have other words inserted in it and the verb ‘wear’ can be inflected. Glossing sentences like this are going to be a challenge. Developing dictionary entries for different kinds of phrases will also require insight.”