El 21/11/15 a las 16:45, Lisi Reisz escribió:
On Saturday 21 November 2015 17:36:46 Mauro Condarelli wrote:
Unfortunately English is not my mother language, so my command of the
language is lacking (so say the least), please bear with me.
Which might limit your ability to comment on the finer nuances of the meaning
of the language.
Please don't take that as a criticism - my knowledge of Italian is only just
the right side of non-existent - but you aren't in a good position to
comment.
If telling somebody that he is incompetent to the point that he is
unable to make meaningful comments is not criticism, then I do not know
what "criticism" means. ;)
English is not my native language either, but that does not mean that I
can not comment on subtle points. I have seen native speakers do much
worser than me. For example, by using "try _and_", instead of "try
_to_", thinking that masculine grammatical gender refers only to males,
and so on. Especially on this last point, being a native speaker of
Spanish makes me better able to judge than an untrained native speaker
of English would.
Ignorant native English speakers seem to have too much trouble
comprehending that grammatical gender in general does not imply the sex
of the subject to which it is applied. In Spanish as in many other
languages, we routinely use nouns with grammatical gender to refer to
both sexes or unspecified (For example: "Los estudiantes" -> "The
students(male)" does not exclude females students, neither does "Las
victimas" -> "The victims(female)" exclude males).
Combined with the fact that political correctness is a plague among
English speaking countries, this has led to deform the English language
as in using "they" for singular. I have the impression that these kinds
of mistakes are more common among native speakers.
Being able to see things from the outside is often an advantage. For
example, learning Lojban (more information available using a search
engine) one is able to see one's native language from an "outside" view
and spot many illogical and ambiguous constructs easily in order to
avoid them.
