Subject: Eating glass, events, and rape

From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 Sep 2000 21:14:46 -0000

Some thoughts I've been meaning to write about in Lojban life. They're
somewhat unrelated for the most part.

First, eating glass. There's the famed "I can eat glass" project on the
net (http://hcs.harvard.edu/~igp/glass.html). The perpetrator of that page
is assembling the phrase "I can eat glass; it doesn't hurt me" in as many
languages as he can, for reasons that can only be guessed at. The Lojban
answer has been there for quite a while, and reads:

mi ka'e citka loi blaci .i la'edi'u na xrani mi

OK, fair enough. But there are two things I take exception to, and I've
written to the owner of the page about the first one. The second is a
known tough chestnut in Lojban and will be dealt with in a future
paragraph. The simpler problem is the use of {la'edi'u}. As it stands
now, as I read it, this means "I can eat glass, and the fact that I *can*
eat glass doesn't hurt me." That is, the *ability* to eat glass causes no
injury (possibly {cortu} is better than {xrani}, but really not worth
disputing). That's not what the English implies. It's the *eating* that
doesn't hurt. I recommended changing the second sentence to {.i le nu mi
ca'a go'i na xrani mi}. This uses {ca'a} to override the {ka'e} and make
it actually *doing* the eating. I suppose I could have dropped the {mi} in
there as well, of course. What do you folks think?

The harder question is one we've hashed over before. Is {le} really the
right article in {le nu...} here? It's not just some specific events of
doing it, I mean it doesn't hurt in general. My gut would prefer {loi nu},
the mass of such events considered lumped together. But that's only SOME
of the mass, {pisu'o loi nu...}. I mean *all* of them, or at least in
general. Probably the best gadri is really the little-used {lo'e}. In
which case, we probably want {lo'e nu} or {le'e nu} most of the time when
we use {le nu}. We get away with it because of the specificity of {le}:
"the ones I have in mind, i.e. the general case." {le} is nice that way,
covering up for a lot of the possible confusion of gadri, but it's easy to
abuse.

Moving on abruptly to rape. For no satisfactory reason, I was puttering
with translating "rape" into Lojban, and generally non-consent. 

<rant>
I'm not going to say, "I'm looking for *the* (or even *a*) lujvo for
'rape'." Any of the possible suggestions I'll come up with could be lujvo
(or veljvo for the lujvo) for the concept in The Unabridged Lojban
Dictionary. The fact that those lujvo could easily be misunderstood to
mean something else isn't relevant, since that's what the (putative)
dictionary is for. Yes, making easily-guessed lujvo is important, but in
theory it's only important in the short term, with nonce lujvo. True,
that's almost all lujvo currently. This is why I feel funny with lujvo.
So let's say I'm looking for a fairly obvious *tanru* instead, so ease of
understanding is definitely a desideratum.
</rant>

OK. So I'm wandering through my gi'uste in a boring class. Let's say I
want to stick with {gletu} as the tertau: some sort of forced,
non-consensual copulation (as opposed to other possible interpretations of
"rape"). Well, generally, finding a word for "non-consensual" isn't easy!
{zifre} is glossed as "willingly," but its definition doesn't mean that; I
can't take {tolzifre} to mean "unwillingly" but "required." Similar, the
simpler {bapli} implies that it was forced... but not that it was
unwilling. I can force you to do something you want, too. We need the
(futile) *resistance* to such force in this case (and similar more common
and less extreme situations too, of course). {tugni} isn't the right kind
of "consent"; nor {sarxe}. Hmm... Now that I've stated it as dependent on
resistance, what do you think of {se fapro gletu}, "opposed." That could
work. Other choices include {vlile}--which could just mean violent but
consensual, or {zekri}, which could mean incest or statutory rape, not
non-consensual. Something like {palci} is a value judgement, and makes a
statement rather than describes... maybe it could be understood, but it
isn't the point, at least not the one I was looking at.

All right, I probably could have had the above argument with some other
example without subjecting everyone to thinking about rape, but that's how
it occurred to me, OK?

Whew. OK, I think I'm ranted out for the moment. It probably won't last.

~mark