Wait prepone is not an English word, what!?
I use it all the time.
Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
11–20 of 576 posts
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#12As a Commonwealth inhabitant, having to deal with a multitude of formalized language variants, each with a small number of differences in orthography and vocabulary, strikes me as a useless waste of energy. Difference and local particularity for its own sake may please the odd local jingoist, but it is simpler to simply take the mother version to be definitive.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#13"Prepone" makes sense even if it's not a word. Closest equivalent I can think of is "move up."
That's a funny example to use, since you can move up a date, but nobody talks about moving down a date. Same problem in the opposite direction. "We're moving up the launch" is common, but never heard anyone say "we're moving down the launch", even though delays are common. The issue with "prepone" is that "pone" isn't really used as a world. A quick googling shows that it is a word, but in regular speech it's not use…
I have not heard about move up a date before but I understand it to move the date to another future date. I guess the point it doesn't matter if it is a word or not as long as it is easily understandable, typically within a region, a culture or an industry.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#14"Prepone" makes sense even if it's not a word. Closest equivalent I can think of is "move up."
That's a funny example to use, since you can move up a date, but nobody talks about moving down a date. Same problem in the opposite direction. "We're moving up the launch" is common, but never heard anyone say "we're moving down the launch", even though delays are common. The issue with "prepone" is that "pone" isn't really used as a world. A quick googling shows that it is a word, but in regular speech it's not use…
Pone may not be a word but pre and post should ideally be quite obvious and self sufficient qualifiers if standardized.
And then I remembered the word preposterous, enough said.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#15Can I gripe about the spelling "nonnative" rather than "non-native"? It the former spelling it looks like it's said all at once, like the word "normative". Probably it's in common use and there are other similar cases we've assimilated, but I don't have to like it.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a funny example to use, since you can move up a date, but nobody talks about moving down a date. Same problem in the opposite direction. "We're moving up the launch" is common, but never heard anyone say "we're moving down the launch", even though delays are common. The issue with "prepone" is that "pone" isn't really used as a world. A quick googling shows that it is a word, but in regular speech it's not use…
Rather than 'up and down', I think the visual is supposed to be 'up and back' (like forward and backward). English is fun
More usually (in the UK) it's forward and back, which make more sense as direct opposites. It's a little confusing though because pushing something back means move it later and bring it forward means move it earlier, whereas when talking directly about time the meanings are usually reversed (e.g. "back in time" means earlier).
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#17"prepone" has been coined independently quite a lot of times in the history of English. It just so happens that it stuck around when the Indians did it.
In Google's Book Ngram Viewer, prepone shows up in a higher percentage of texts in the early 1800s than in text from the past two decades. However, I don't know how accurate the corpus is for those old texts.
If you look through the documents from that period it looks like they are a mix of words split over lines, non-english words, and ORC errors.
G'Ngrams is very unreliable when it comes to the oldest materials. One clue to that is how the occurrence goes from max to min and back again in less than a decade.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#18Wait prepone is not an English word, what!? I use it all the time.
I have never heard it or even seen it in my life.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#19"Prepone" makes sense even if it's not a word. Closest equivalent I can think of is "move up."
That's a funny example to use, since you can move up a date, but nobody talks about moving down a date. Same problem in the opposite direction. "We're moving up the launch" is common, but never heard anyone say "we're moving down the launch", even though delays are common. The issue with "prepone" is that "pone" isn't really used as a world. A quick googling shows that it is a word, but in regular speech it's not use…
Moving up a date is like moving up toward the front in a line (or queue) vs moving back.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#20Can I gripe about the spelling "nonnative" rather than "non-native"? It the former spelling it looks like it's said all at once, like the word "normative". Probably it's in common use and there are other similar cases we've assimilated, but I don't have to like it.
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