EnglishRaven
Joined: 04 Jan 2008
Posts: 71
Location: Changwon Korea and Melbourne Australia
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 Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 4:06 am Post subject: |
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Actually, you can say both "at night" and "in the night" - but the meaning is clearly different for each one.
"At night" means "at that time regularly or in general".
"In the night" means during the course of a night, something that happens during that time on a specific night.
As for the use of "in" or "at" with different times of the day, try not to read that as a general grammatical rule. It is more about collocation and words that match up with other words (in turn creating language 'chunks').
For example, we can say the milk is sour, but we can't say butter is sour. We say butter is rancid. Sour and rancid both mean basically the same thing (gone bad), but one of the adjectives goes only with one noun, and the other adjective with the other noun.
That is the crazy nature of the English language, with so many exceptions to rules you wonder what point there is in learning all the rules to start with! But actually, almost all languages have these inconsistencies, and special collocation rules.
- Jason
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