Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
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Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#2"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.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#3"Prepone" makes sense even if it's not a word.
Closest equivalent I can think of is "move up."
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#4"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 used as a standalone.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#5"Prepone" makes sense even if it's not a word. Closest equivalent I can think of is "move up."
I've read that people learning English have difficulty with phrasal verbs like "move up" [1], so I can understand why "prepone" might become popular.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#6"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.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#7Strange choice of interview subjects given the article title: the first seems to be a native speaker and the second asserts he is a native speaker. They're just not from the US.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#8Anyone who's actually been to India (and other British colonies with natives, like Singapore, Hongkong) knows that the English out there has branched into its own language, with own slang, own spelling and own colloquial phrases.
Imagine a world where India is the center of the English speaking world (not too far fetched considering the population of English speakers), we would all start using prepone because that's just the cultural norm of the most common branch of English.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#9"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 down a date
I'd consider "(later) down the road" an example of that.
Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
#10"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…
Rather than 'up and down', I think the visual is supposed to be 'up and back' (like forward and backward).
English is fun