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.