By the age of eighteen he was completely independent of/ from his parents.

[GeneD]

Being unsure which preposition (of or from) should go after the word independent, I looked the latter up in the dictionary and found that both are possible, but what I still can't understand is whether they are fully intechangeable. Let's take a couple of examples from the dictionary.

By the age of eighteen he was completely independent of his parents. Is from possible?
The country became fully independent from France in 1960. (Of?)
This organization is independent of the government. (From?)

Is it okay to say a couple speaking about more things than two? In Russian, it sometimes has very approximate meaning and three or four could be called couple. What about English? I just don't know whether to change one of the sentenses above to make it grammatical or it's already correct.

 

[jutfrank]

No, from and for are not interchangeable. They have different meanings/uses. I cannot go into a detailed discussion of semantic differences, so I'll just give you what I think is a very general, approximate, but pretty reliable rule of usage for when these prepositions follow independent/independence.

• to be independent of something

Use of with the state verb be. You're talking about a relation (a relative state).

• to gain independence from something

Use from when the verb has a meaning of change of state (i.e., from dependence to independence).



Very generally, we use from:

a) to express a movement away from something
b) to emphasise a distance between things.

 

[jutfrank]

1. By the age of eighteen he was completely independent of his parents.
2. The country became fully independent from France in 1960.
3. This organization is independent of the government.

1. of is preferable as the sentence means to describe his state relative to his parents.
2. Either could work here, depending on whether we want to focus on the change of state (from) or the resultant state (of).
3. of is preferable as the sentence means to describe a relative state.