:-) from = for, of.

[Joel S. Berson]

At 10/26/2009 06:13 AM, Damien Hall wrote:
>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?

Third possibility:  Beowulf has recently appeared in two messages
from Jon, the other being in the context of parable and Kierkegaard:
>The History Channel's show on Beowulf (2009) explains that the dragon
>epsiode is "an allegory about the dangers of greed."

Clearly there is some blogger going under the name of -- or actually
being? -- Beowulf, posing as the wise advisor, and guide to the value
of the book being reviewed.  And, not surprisingly, attracting the
attention of the History Channel.

Joel


>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
>
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>     (mobile) +44 (0)771 853 5634
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>
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>
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>
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