The word 'forerunners' is correct and usable in written English.
It typically means a person or thing that comes before and introduces or anticipates something, such as a new development or trend. Example sentence: The new technology of the 21st century had many forerunners in the years prior.
What is on offer, though, is the idea of being philosophical, taking things as they come, not getting excited; not philosophy as Wittgenstein, and his forerunners back to Plato, pursued it.
He compares plutocracy in modern America to its forerunners in 17th-century Holland and 19th-century Britain.
Adolph Menzel, who was later seen as one of the forerunners of Impressionism, asked Felicie if she had seriously spent money on this "dreck".
Muybridge's motion studies can be fairly credited as the forerunners of the cinema.
Latecomers to industrialisation can follow the path their forerunners broke before them and perhaps skip some steps along the way.
By contrast, it took Labour four years to open the first 27 academies, and the previous Tory government five years to open 15 city technology colleges, forerunners of academies.The huge number of conversions has overwhelmed teaching unions, who had hoped to take on schools aspiring to academy status through a combination of targeted PR campaigns and legal challenges.
It seemed exotic everywhere, never quite for the right reasons.Before the Spaniards brought the Mesoamerican turkey to Europe, it had been domesticated by forerunners of the Aztecs, first for its colourful feathers and then for its meat.
For four decades it has been seeking to join the European Union and its forerunners.
The pattern and colours denoted affiliations such as school, regiment or sporting club.If the precise moment of inception is vague the point of victory of the lounge suit over its forerunners as the standard battledress of the office worker is clearer.
They found a range of approaches: from the "hesitators" (nearly half the sample), who do very little save purchase a few emissions certificates, to the "forerunners" (only six of the 114), who go as far as including climate-change risk analyses in their investment proposals.
They describe how Juhayman and his followers, who in some ways were forerunners of al-Qaeda, huddled anxiously together to decide whether the Prophet would have approved of television (excoriated as the work of the devil), football (frowned on if the players wore short shorts) and banknotes (deemed idolatrous since they bore the portrait of the king).
