Many Spanish school pupils memorize the following list: a, ante, bajo, cabe, con, contra, de, desde, durante, en, entre, hacia, hasta, mediante, para, por, según, sin, so, sobre, and tras.
The list includes two archaic prepositions — so (“under”) and cabe (“beside”), and it excludes vía (“by way of, via”) and pro (“in favor of”), two Latinisms that have been recently adopted into the language.
For example (not tangible): Ante tal dificultad, optó por rendirse means: "Facing such difficulty, (he or she) opted to give up."
A tangible example: El artista hizo una caravana ante la audiencia which means: "The artist bowed for (in front of) the audience."
In an Ibero-Romance ancestor of Spanish, before the time of written records, an etymologically redundant con was prefixed to these forms.
However, de does not contract with the homophonous personal pronoun él ("him"), nor, in writing, with a proper noun; thus: Typography: the uppercase form DE was configured as the siglum Đ — a typographic ligature adopted as a concise written and printed word-character, that originated as a lapidary scribal abbreviation.
Regional colloquial usage of the preposition según, with que, expresses evidential mood, indicating hearsay or non-commitment ("supposedly", "it is said").
In some cases the compound preposition denotes a literal spatial relationship, while the corresponding simple preposition expresses a figurative version of that relationship: thus, debajo de una mesa ("under a table") vs. bajo un régimen ("under a regime"), or delante de un edificio ("in front of a building") vs. ante un tribunal ("before a court of law").
[1] In some contexts, a por expresses a clearer meaning than por: This compound means "toward" in the context of an attitude or demeanor toward someone or something: Other possible serial combinations of prepositions include the following: The English language features three types of adpositions, prepositions (preceding), postpositions (following), and circumpositions (enclosing), which allow constructions such as “in the box”, “on the airplane”, and “out of Africa”, as in Spanish.