Hi, I’m a bit confused: I used to think that capable is followed by of as in She is capable of making her own decisions. Now I have found this phrase in an online dictionary:
capable to inherit
Is this a Germanism that does not exist in real English?
Thank you,
Nicole
Hi Nicole, I agree capable of is the usual constuctiom as in:
capable of deceiving others/ capable of deceit.
I don’t know capable to. Perhaps it’s a sort of muddled variation of capacity to as in: have the capacity to deceive.
Alan
Hi,
You know, when someone is “capable of anything”, you think suspicious thoughts, not confident thoughts.
I suggest that an entity could be capable of deceiving or some other undesirable concept – even capable of being easily cheated.
In contrast, I suggest that a company or organization can claim to be capable to fulfill desired objectives – capable to enable the client organization to exceed customer expectations within a desired period of time, for example.
“Our company is capable to assist you.”
Best regards,
Elisabeth Baker
Hi Elizabeth,
Welcome to the forum. I can’t accept ‘capable to’ because I would only say ‘capable of’. Perhaps this should be:
Alan
Shouldn’t “Our company is able to assist” be “Our company can assist”?
Google search [“capable to” -“capable of”] reveals about 24,300,000 results, including SAP.com official documentation.
In business, industry and (especially) management consulting terms, perhaps “capable” carries a more functional connotation than “able”.
First of all I would like to note that Google’s counter shows the wrong data (also, the user should keep in view that it does not recognize punctuation marks, eg. the resuts on “capable to” will include “capable, to” as well). If you get the last page you will see that the amount of results is about 800 (80 pages) for each of the three cases:
“capable to” -“capable of”
“capable of” -“capable to”
“capable for”,
“Google books” gives approximatly the same result.
I suppose, to say briefly, “capable” relates to the “arrangement” of the subject, “able” - to its function.
The article differencebetween.net/langua … apability/ notes that the idea of “capability” contains limitation and future. That rises from an arrangement - an arrangement defines, that in fact restricts.
The dictionary dictionary.reference.com/browse/capable?s=t considers “capable of” an idiom. In this case, like “susceptible” in “susceptible of”, "capable’ in “capable of” probably takes a passive sense and is percepted as a certain analogue of “it is made of”, etc.
“Capable for” is probably a development of the idea of the idiomatic, “passive”, “capable of”, a certain analogue of “it is made for”. Though, I am not sure that “capable for” is a correct expression.
“Capable to” is probably just a usual use of “capable”.
Such are my notes and hypotheses.
“Able to assist you” sounds more friendly than “capable of assisting you”. So from a business point of view, if you’re trying to make a sale, you’d go with able to.