'depend on' vs. 'depend from'

[Nicole]

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
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[Alan]

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
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English as a Second Language
You can read my ESL story Present Simple

[Jamie (K)]

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.

[Conchita]

[Torsten]

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.

TOEIC listening, question-response: What type of wine do you prefer?

[Jamie (K)]

[Nicole2112]

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?

[Nicole2112]

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.

[Yankee]

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. :wink:

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
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[Jamie (K)]

[Jamie (K)]

[Yankee]

[Nicole2112]

[Spencer]

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

[Jamie (K)]