from = for, of.

[Damien Hall]

Thus Jon:

>Amazon.com heads some pages of customer reviews like this:
>
>"This review is from: Beowulf (Mentor) (Paperback)"

Looks to me like a bad translation of something written in French or German
or Spanish (or any one of a great number of languages which have the same
lexeme covering some of the meanings of 'for' and some of the meanings of
'of'). There's no reason why such a bad translation should appear on
Amazon's pages in particular, except the following: I sometimes receive
e-mails from Amazon's German site. To my recollection I have never bought
anything from it (not speaking German well), but it is possible that books
I have bought through the Amazon sites in languages I do speak have in fact
come from Germany, especially since I have been living in Europe, without
necessarily saying that that was where they were being sold from. If so,
might this be an auto-translation of a site originally in the language of
the country where a particular book was being sold from? I think Jon
doesn't live in Europe, but might this convoluted reasoning apply here? I
feel compelled to be a little bit convoluted because I can't see why
Amazon, an American company as far as I'm aware, wouldn't have English
native speakers writing its English-language output as a default; and
'from' for 'for' or 'of' isn't the kind of mistake that a native speaker
would make, surely?

Second possibility (maybe more likely?): a Hispanic American
second-language speaker of English wrote this particular line, and it
wasn't checked by a first-language speaker?

Damien

--
Damien Hall

University of York
Department of Language and Linguistic Science
Heslington
YORK
YO10 5DD
UK

Tel. (office) +44 (0)1904 432665
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BORDERS AND IDENTITIES CONFERENCE, JAN 2010:
http://www.york.ac.uk/res/aiseb/bic2010/

http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/lang/people/pages/hall.htm

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