Re: The difficulties of judging a language which you don't speak natively (was Re: The difficulties of being weirder than English)

Javier BF wrote at 2004-05-28 20:56:40 (-0400)
 > >The first item: somebody here posted an interesting link a few weeks
 > >ago to Talmy's typology of verbs of motion
 > >(http://elies.rediris.es/elies11/cap2.htm, if anyone's interested).
 >
 > I had already heard about this typology of verbs of motion, but had
 > a look into that link anyway... only to get nonplussed at this piece
 > of utter nonsense:
 >
 > http://elies.rediris.es/elies11/cap226.htm
 >
[...]
 >
 > Then, the guy, who I had thought to be knowledgeable, lists a series
 > of poor near-translations for (2.19), in each instance pointing out
 > the semantic nuances from the original they fail to express, and as
 > you see he claims those examples are all and the closest Spanish can
 > get to try to express the "much richer" content of the English sentence
 > without sounding "unnatural" or being "unfaithful"; proving that, given
 > that his knowledge of Spanish is clearly limited and second-hand, he
 > should have first cared to ask a native speaker before daring to be
 > so bold as to state categorically that Spanish cannot express it:
 >

The author of that document, as stated on the title page[1], is Juan
Pablo Mora Gutiérrez.  According to his personal page[2] he has been
an associate professor in the department of Spanish Language,
Linguistics and Literary Theory at the university of Seville since
1997.

While I know nothing more about the gentleman personally, it seems
unlikely that his knowledge of Spanish is "limited and second-hand".


[1] http://elies.rediris.es/elies11/
[2] http://www.fing.us.es/personalpages/jpm/