here you are/there you are

KZY   Monday, March 07, 2005, 04:49 GMT
I looked up both of them in my dictionary but I`m still confused about when exactly they are used. I think I`m more familar with "here you are" like:

A. "Can I have a cup of tea, please?"

B. "Here you are."

When do you say "there you are"? Thank you.
Kazoo   Monday, March 07, 2005, 05:11 GMT
You can use them interchangeably.
Brennus   Monday, March 07, 2005, 05:43 GMT
In fact, English "Here you are!" or "There you are!"; "There you go! etc. is an actually an idiomatic expression. Many other languages say it it differently as in Spanish ¡Aquí está! and Irish Gaelic Seo duit! (pronounced shah gwitch) as in Seo duit, a Neansai! (Here you go, Nancy!)
Brennus   Monday, March 07, 2005, 05:44 GMT
Seo duit means literally "here's to you!"
Brennus   Monday, March 07, 2005, 05:47 GMT
No, make that "This to you!". (Who said that Hungarian is the world's most difficult language?)
Travis   Monday, March 07, 2005, 05:54 GMT
I would dispute that there is any such thing as "the world's most difficult language"; language learning difficulty is a non-factor for one's native language, and then for second languages and like is a matter of the differences or lack thereof between said language and what language(s) one already knows. That said, the reason why people say that Hungarian is a "difficult" language is that it is very different from most of the generic Indo-European languages that most Europeans and Americans are used to, being a Uralic language, and hence that makes it seemingly harder from their perspective. Other prominent Uralic languages are Finnish and Estonian (which're both in the Baltic-Finnic subbranch of the Uralic group), and I've heard people in the past say that Finnish is a "really hard" or "really weird" language overall. Of course, that obviously isn't true from the perspective of a native speaker of, say, another case-heavy agglutinative language which has vowel harmony and which is aspect rather than tense-oriented.
Brennus,   Monday, March 07, 2005, 06:46 GMT
Travis,

That's the traditional saying about the Hungarians, that "they have the world its most beautiful women and its most difficult language".

Re: I would dispute that there is any such thing as "the world's most difficult language"

Here, most linguists who actually study the way humans speak, would agree with you. One of them, the late Mario Pei (1901-1978) once said that we consider the languages most like our own to be "easy" and the ones that are the least like our own to be "hard".
Brennus   Monday, March 07, 2005, 06:48 GMT
that "they have the world... - should read - that "they gave the world...