Please, clarify me the difference between the verbs to allow and to enable.
What are the peculiarities in their meanings especially in formal and technical context?
As example, I have such context
Thereby it will enable/allow to change the date of planned work in case of
serious complaints from other teams related to business necessity.
But I would appreciate more broad explanation of meaning distinctions, beyond the context I've given.
Thank you for assistance!
Best Answer
Semantically, permit would convey exactly the same meaning as allow / enable here, but personally I don't like this "intransitive" usage (where it's unspecified who is enabled / allowed / permitted to do something). It's a relatively recent usage, as show by this NGram...
As pointed out above, I see no possibility of any of those three verbs conveying any different meaning. Idiomatically, allow is probably more common in such contexts, but that doesn't mean the alternatives are in any sense "incorrect" - providing it's used transitively (with an "object" such as us, you, one,...
But whereas the "intransitive" version with allow merely "grates" on my ear, I'd be more inclined to say that such usages really are "syntactically invalid" with enable / permit. So if you insist on not specifying who is allowed/permitted/enabled to do something, you should probably stick with allow (but I at least will always tend to assume "non-native speaker" when I see/hear that usage).
Offhand I can't think of many contexts where there's any significant difference in meaning between to allow / permit / enable [someone to do something], but perhaps one might argue that being enabled more strongly implies having an (internally-based) ability/capacity to do something, whereas being allowed / permitted more strongly alludes to not being prevented from doing something by (externally-based) constraints. Thus one might favour...
...but in practice I don't think many people would make that distinction. On the other hand, only allow / permit can really be used where the intended sense is very clearly that of being given permission / having (existing, rule-based) constraints lifted, as in...
1 As an example of an "unusual" context where enabled could work for that last example...