Hi can anyone explain the difference between wysłać and przesłać?
I asked native speakers on another forum and I received a variety of answers:-
- Someone said they are synonymous.
- Someone said that wysłać = to send (something) and przesłać - to forward (somebody) something.
- Someone said that wysłać means to send a material object and przesłać is to send something non-material (e.g. greetings, or an electronic file).
- Someone said that ‘In most cases you can use these two forms interchangeably and there is no specific context in which the use of one of these verbs instead of the other could be considered a serious mistake. However “wysłać(perfective)/wysyłać(imperfective)” is the most general and therefore the most common verb referring to both objects and people and concerns any act of dispatching somebody or something, or forwarding something from one place to another.
“Przesłać/przesyłać” relates largely to things, rather than to humans and is closer in its meaning to “to forward”, so the act of sending a mail, letter, message, parcel etc. to someone else, to a different place, or different intended recipient. It also seems to accentuate slightly the fact of redirecting something rather than the act of dispatching itself. This form also sounds just a little bit more formal than “wysłać”. I am not fully sure of course but I assume the difference between “wysłać/przesłać” is the same as the one of English verbs “to send/to dispatch”.’
Which is the best answer? Or is it a combination of several of the answers? Would the original sentence still be grammatically correct and/or sound natural if ‘wysłać’ had been used instead of ‘przesłać’. Thanks in advance.