881: On versus Onto May 7, 2017

There are some prescriptive grammatical rules, such as the idea that in English it is not right to end a sentence with a preposition, but following those does not make a language any more or less understandable. Other rules, which may be though of as conventions instead, are based only retrospectively on the way that people already speak, and tend to be told for the use of people learning a second language, as a native speaker would probably not need to think about it. A native English speaker, for example, would likely not need to be told the difference between 'on' and 'onto', and just use them without thinking twice. It is even less important to describe this convention because the words can be used interchangeably in many sentences. 'Onto', however, is chosen to show motion towards whereas 'on' describes a motion in the same spot, so in 'he jumped onto the box' we could assume that beforehand the subject was not on the box, whereas with 'he jumped on the box', that same sense is not necessarily conveyed.