Revista Volumen I (formato pdf) - Academia Puertorriqueña de ...

Carmelo Delgado Cintrón 189cida y contorcida, o contorsionada (como algunos dicen) con vueltasy revueltas laberínticas donde el hombre más perspicaz y atentoconcluye por sentirse extraviado, anulado e impotente. Tanmalditísima lengua es no pocas veces producto de deficiencia intelectualy mala educación académica de quienes la utilizan; pero,no con rara frecuencia, obedece a encubierto designio de afán lucrativo;cual es el de enredar y prolongar indefinidamente las pequeñasdiferencias de orden legal, pleitos y litigios, que a cada pasosurgen entre los hombres, y de esta suerte sacar más sustanciosojugo y todo el rendimiento posible a costa de los infelices litigantesy pleiteantes. Gran verdad encierra aquella maldición gitana:pleitos tengas y los ganes.El abogado Richard Hyland en su monografía titulada: "A Defense ofLegal Writing," 32 además de examinar la abundante bibliografía sobre eltema, achaca a diversas causas la pobreza de la expresión escrita. Una deellas es el abandono de las humanidades y las repercusiones de ello en elpensar conceptuoso.The difficulty lawyers face in learning to write legal argumentis that they have little access to training in conceptual thought, eitheroutside the law or within it. At one time, conceptual thinkingwas learned indirectly, by the reading of good books, but muchless of that is done today. By far the most powerful method wasinstruction in the classics. Through the careful fitting of word-towordand phrase to phrase in translation, the study of Latin andGreek traditionally provided an insight into the intimate relationbetween form and sense, language and argument. Even more importantly,the classics offered intimacy with a complex structure ofrules. In order to parse a Greek verb, the modern reader must analyzeits half-dozen constituent elements and place it in one of themost intricate structures of rules and exceptions ever developed.Today, in the wake of the jet airplane, foreign language trainingemploys, almost exclusively, repetition and patterned variation, atechnique that yields no insight into the structure either of the foreignlanguage or of one's own. The schools have abandoned humanismand instead stumble to keep pace with technological development.As a result, a reading knowledge of classical Greek isprobably as rare in contemporary America as it was in pre-32 Richard Hyland, ―A defense of legal Writing‖, University of PennsylvaniaLaw Review, Volume 134, Number 3, March 1986, p. 599, la cita precisa es a laspaginas 621-622.