Good evening. I remember being taught that it should read ‘depend on’. However, I often hear ‘depend from’ and if you look this up in Google you will get tens of thousands fo pages containing this combination. So, what is correct, depend on or depend from or both?
Have a Good Friday.
Nicole
Hi Nicole,
I am happier with depend on but then who am I to argue with Google? I hesitate to say which is correct if there are examples you’ve found using from. As I say, I would always use depend on as in: It depends on the weather/depending on the weather/I am depending on you and so on.
Alan
If I google the two collocations, I get more than 200 million hits for “depend on”, and only 140,000 for “depend from”.
If you examine the texts that Google gives you for “depend from”, you’ll find that a lot of them are clearly written by people with only an intermediate command of English. Sentences like, “Result of the test mostly depend from network connection…” or, “But it is strongly depend from your hardware and satellites status,” you’ve got clear examples of non-native English usage.
Then you’ve got instances where native speakers are engaging in the common habit of saying, “It depends,” without saying what “it” depends on. So, when you see, “It depends from case to case,” you need to divide it not as [it] [depends from] [case to case], but as [it depends] [from case to case]. It’s like saying, “From case to case, it depends on X.”
In addition to this, you’ve got some cases that are uses of the archaic collocation “depend from” in the sense of to hang from. Some of the examples also seem to indicate “depend from” as being a specialized usage for legal documents.
I think those unusual examples account for most of the 140,000 instances of “depend from”, and you can be pretty secure that “depend on” is by far the most common form.
By the way, instead of saying to divide a phrase, I tried to use the word p-a-r-s-e, and the software claimed it was a swear word and wouldn’t let me use it. I can find no vulgar meaning of that term. Strange.
:oops:
If you take out the ‘p’ you get a vulgar British slang word for ‘buttocks’, which I don’t think is used in the United States.
The same happened to me twice on this forum. The first time, it took me several minutes to figure out what the word was. I had written a list of computer science terms in English and Spanish and had tried to include the pronominal form of the verb ‘bajar’ (to unload)! The second time was with the name of the city Mar-seille.
By the way, I liked the expression: ‘the software claimed it was…’. It made me think of a person rather than a system.
When we set up the forum word censor we used a very rigid approach - Conchiata was right about that British term. Now we have remove it from the censor list it and you can parse any phrase that meets certain standards.[YSaerTTEW443543]
TOEIC listening, question-response: What type of wine do you prefer?[YSaerTTEW443543]
Actually, we do use it, but here is the odd thing: We use it to avoid sounding vulgar! Isn’t that weird? This is a famous case in historical linguistics, in fact. It’s in textbooks. Originally we used the same form the British use. Then, in order to avoid vulgarity, people began using the word that means a donkey. With time, though, that got to be considered vulgar, and people didn’t know anymore that the version with the R was originally vulgar, and so now you have the situation where people use the donkey word when they want to be obscene, and the R version when they want to be more polite. Maybe the fact that it’s more common in Britain and in old literature contributes to the popular misconception that it’s a polite word.
Why would it block THOSE? This is getting weirder all the time!
I put a lot of effort into making sure my linguistics students understand that computers don’t know anything, and here I am anthropomorphizing not merely a machine, but the program inside the machine!
This question got me wondering. I knew I’d heard the phrase “depend from” used before, and correctly, too, but I couldn’t remember why…
So I went Googling and found an interesting discussion on the subject, here.
Apparently uses of “depend from” stem from the word “depend” literally meaning “to hang”…? As in, “the fruit depended from the tree”? Seems to me that would be considered an archaic usage. But I’m seeing other examples of the phrase in technical contexts that seem derived from that literal meaning, so that “depend from” becomes sort of synonymous with “stem from” or “extend from” or “derive from”. I’m not 100% sure how correct that is.
Comments?
Not that I mean to make a habit of replying to my own posts, but I actually just now came across a use of “depend from” in modern English. (Maybe reading this thread caused me to be super-aware of it.) It was in a story by Sarah Brandywine Johnson, “Hanging The Glass,” published in the debut issue of Fantasy Magazine.
Again, it looks like it’s a case of the literal meaning of the word, “to hang [from] or be supported [by].”
Neat!
Hi all
I hear “depend from” quite often from my students and in this case it is clearly a “translation error” stemming from the German “abh?ngig von”. The German “von” ist frequently correctly translated with “from”… but not in this context. 
But I find the “hang” discussion above all the more interesting in that “hang” is also found in the German expression (abh?ngig von).
Amy
This can tell you more about science fiction and fantasy fiction than about modern English usage. Many people who are really deep into science fiction and fantasy also have a fascination with archaic words and usages, and they incorporate them into the things they write. My brother majored in English literature, particularly Shakespeare, and used to have an extreme fixation on science fiction, reading more than 200 sci-fi books a year, and saying that only 14 or 15 of them were worthwhile. Half his friends were the same way, and they’d collect archaic words and collocations, and then look for opportunities to use them in their writing. If they did it well, it enhanced their writing, but if sometimes it was very forced, and it made the writing less intelligible.
I think this is a common trait among people involved in that genre of fiction.
Speakers of many other languages mistranslate in this same way, because they also have collocations that amount to “depend from” in figurative sense. In French you say “dependre de”, and in Spanish “depender de”". It’s the same thing.
Add to this the tendency of German speakers to translate the word “von” as “from” in places where they shouldn’t (“the job from my husband”, “the dog from my sister”), and you’ve got a triplely or quadruplely reinforced error.
You can say that again! :lol:
Amy
I don’t know about how much this applies to the genre in general–I’ve seen quite the range of writing styles, from super slangy to archaic and every point in between–but in the case of this particular story you may have a point. It was more of a “literary fiction” story than a fantasy story, more of a chronicle of a friendship than of any fantastic occurrences. The narrative voice was mainly a modern one (the story took place over a period of 30 years or so ending in 1999), but it was more of a slowed down, stately pace. The academic vocabulary no doubt contributed to this.
This is kind of weird, but in my language the words depend and hang are the same.
It depens on - att?l F?GG
hangs from a hook - egy kamp?n F?GG
And in our grammar the phrase depens from would be the one we’d use.
I think it must be a Hungarian who screwed up the system 
Spencer
I think it’s the same way in French, Spanish and some other European languages. I don’t think it’s the Hungarians who did that damage. 
It must’ve been ATTILA!
Hey, don’t you go trying to shift the blame now!
In French and Spanish, ‘d?pendre’ and ‘depender’ (respectively) rather mean ‘to depend’, whereas ‘to hang’ is translated as ‘pendre’ and ‘colgar’ (or the less commonly used ‘pender’). Yet curiously, they do translate ‘to unhang’ as ‘d?pendre/descolgar’ (Fr./Sp.). So your supposition is half true after all – only for the French word, that is (well, it makes it only about a quarter true, if my maths is right!).
YES!
I told you!
We did it!
IMHO Nicole, literary norm is “depend on”.Yes,you may hear “depend from” but it’s only colloquial level.
Hi, friends…
I just decided to check whether I had written correct “depend from” and found your old debate … it was very interesting to know all of this …
I want to say that in Russian the words “depend” and “hang” are cognate. Hang is “висеть”, depend is “ЗАвисеть”…But it is interesting that we never use the pretext “on” with it…
We use that contrary, never saying “висеть от” (hang from) и “зависеть на”(“depend on”)…We say like “depend from” and “Hang on”…So i think many russin translators have made that mistake in english…
Big greetings to the next russian translator who maybe will read it…