Are the following sentences correct? What’s the difference between ‘than’ and ‘to’ in this case? Does anything change?
e.g. I prefer English to Maths.
I prefer English than Maths.
“than” is incorrect here. The pattern is “prefer X to Y”.
Dozy,
Can I not say like this:
“I prefer English rather than Maths.”?
Only with the verb prefer can the preposition ‘to’ work?
This pattern is sometimes used, and may be tolerated in everyday English. However, in my opinion it is not strictly logical, and is inferior to the version with “to”, certainly in polished English.
In the pattern “I prefer X Y”, the standard preposition is “to”. It has just occurred to me that “over” is also sometimes used.