По

[jim-24601.livejournal.com]

In another post, somebody used по in a sense I'm not familiar with, as Кто Эдуард по профессии? meaning "What's Edward's job?" I think I got a bit confused with the prefix по- against the preposition по.

Ok, bear with me a moment here. This is what I get so far.

The по- construction (with hyphen) means "in the way of", or at least that's the most general way of expressing it in English. It also seems to do weird things to the following word, so we get по-русски not по-русскому (по русскому would mean "in the opinion of a Russian", right?) and по-мОему "my way" vs. по моемУ "according to my (something)". It's more like a prefix than a preposition.

По without the hyphen is a real preposition taking the dative case whether it's used literally, meaning "along", or figuratively, meaning "according to", or something like "in the sense of" ("Who are you according to your beliefs" would mean in English, to me at least "Who do you believe you are" and not "What are your beliefs".) But you might say "По моим убежениям, Бога нет" (if you were an atheist).

How about "по X" = "as far as X is concerned", as in:

Кто Эдуард по профессии? = "Who is Edward, as far as his job is concerned?"
По национальности я русский = "As far as nationality is concerned, I'm Russian."
По прогнозу синоптиков сегодня будет дождь = "As far as the weather forecast is concerned, it's going to rain today"

It sounds awkward, but then we don't use that construction in English, so any attempt to describe it is going to sound awkward.

(Edit to explain the background)

Comments

[oryx_and_crake]

I'm looking for a single English expression that captures both meanings.
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You'll never find one. Not just for "по" but for most other words as well. Languages do not work that way. Every word has a "nest" of meanings, and for any given Russian word you'll never find an English word whose nest of meanings will be 100% the same.