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

> > 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/
Oh, sorry, I hadn't noticed that - I actually thought the author was
another.

Then, bluntly put: that 'gentleman' is stupid - I have just provided
the examples that prove it. But his bio offers a clarifying bit: he
studied _English_ philology, apparently getting so dazzled at that
the different features he found in English that he was blinded into
believing them "superior". I'm sending him an e-mail right now, so
that he corrects the rubbish he published.

Cheers,
Javier