spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
No. No one is "in" the internet. You might know someone "from" the internet.
"On" internet or "In" internet?
- Thread starter Saint
- Start date
No. No one is "in" the internet. You might know someone "from" the internet.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
No. One of the most difficult aspects of English for a foreign student is our tiny set of prepositions.
They have very little meaning. This is obvious because if you use the wrong one, 99% of the time no one will have any trouble understanding your sentence. I have often said that the only purpose of prepositions is to help us identify foreigners.
They are inadequate for their purpose of expressing a relationship between two things. Most of them are inherited from the Stone Age. Unlike nouns and verbs English has no mechanism for creating new prepositions, so very few have been invented since the Stone Age. Behind, against, without, into... there are a few, but only a few.
Out of frustration we've pressed other words into service as DIY-prepositions.
- Absent (an adjective) any disagreement from our attorneys, we will go ahead with the plan.
- I wrote the company a letter regarding (a verb) our problem with their product.
- A user-friendly interface.
- An energy-efficient appliance.
- A cable-ready TV set.
- A labor-intensive project.
My point is that our prepositions are so useless and confusing that even we hate them and are aggressively replacing them! So if you have trouble with them, it's no surprise.
You can't figure out which preposition is the correct one in any given situation by logic. You have to simply notice how other people use them, and copy our usage. Which is what you're doing here. Good for you!
What country do you live in? My information technology career in the United States goes back to 1967 and I've never seen it spelled with two L's. As I noted, that spelling is not in any of the American dictionaries that Dictionary.com uses as source material.
spidergoat
Valued Senior Member
Everyone knows facebook is on the internet, so you don't have to say that. #1 is correct.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
No. You learned about it from the internet, but you read it (or read about it) on the internet.
As I said, there is no logic in our use of prepositions. You have to learn each combination individually, and you can't generalize from one to another.
No. You can say, "I knew him through the Ornithological Society," or "through my contacts in my university alumni association," or "through my temporary job in the cafeteria." It needs to be an organization, not a place.
Otherwise you should say how you met the person. "I met her in the park," "I met him at work," "I met them on the bus."
So, "I met my friend from Africa on Facebook." You're talking about a specific person so you should not say "a friend." And as Spider says, you don't have to tell us that Facebook is an internet site. Even if you did, "of the internet" would be the wrong way to say it. "On the internet" would be better.
"I found a new job on one of the career boards on the internet."
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
No. . . . . in cyberspace. No "the."
Most would say "I read it ON the internet".
As for whether one gets things ON or OFF the internet, I think that is more context specific: for information I would say "I got it OFF the internet" but for things like purchases, I might say "I got it ON the internet".
ON could also mean ABOUT... i.e. "you got a book on the internet" could mean you bought a book through Amazon (or other online retailer), or it could mean you bought a book on the subject of the internet.
Such is the varied use of IN, ON, OFF etc.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Americans never say "in" the internet. It's "on" the internet.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
We invented it. We make the rules. It's "on the internet." Everybody else is wrong.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
I never know when you're joking, but that is not a correct etymology of the morpheme "inter-".
Inter is a Latin preposition, the word for "between" or "among." It is not a compound. Its venerable roots go all the way back to the Proto-Indo-European preposition enter, which meant exactly the same thing.
This word has been passed down widely throughout the Indo-European family, usually with the same meaning, such as Sanskrit antar, but occasionally with a slight shift in meaning such as English "under," or an even greater shift, such as Greek entera, "intestines."
"Internet" was a shortening in 1985 of the original coinage "internetwork." Originally it meant a set of linked DoD networks, using the prefix meaning "among" or "between" to express the sense that its purpose was to facilitate communication among or between the individual networks.
"Inter-" has nothing to do with "in" or "inside." The similarity between Latin inter and Latin (and English, German, Italian, etc.) in is coincidental.
within a group > within a network
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Inter may refer to:
* inter to place inside of the earth, from the Latin "in" (in) + "terra" (earth, ground)
Further information: burial
* Inter- is a Latin prefix meaning "between", among, or "within a group".
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in·ter (n-tûr)
tr.v. in·terred, in·ter·ring, in·ters
To place in a grave or tomb; bury.
[Middle English enteren, from Old French enterrer, from Medieval Latin interrre : Latin in-, in; see in-2 + Latin terra, earth; see ters- in Indo-European roots.]
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inter-, intero-
(Latin: between; among, mutually, together; on the inside, internal)
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??
still no?
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Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Still no. We don't pronounce it in-TER-net.