Subject: Re: [lojban] Eating glass, events ...

From: "Mark E. Shoulson" <[email-masked]>
Date: 14 Sep 2000 03:01:21 -0000

>From: Ivan A Derzhanski <[email-masked]>
>Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 08:43:40 +0300
>
>
>"Mark E. Shoulson" wrote:
>> 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.
>
>This is the sort of situation in which I usually wonder if the proposer
>of the sentence doesn't realise how hard it is to translate from English,
>or maybe he does and wants to see how people will handle it (but how will
>he if he's not familiar with the target lgs of all the translations?).
>
>The En word _hurt_ has as I see it at least five loosely related meanings:

I deliberately didn't try to touch the "hurt." {xrani} may not be the
best, but it's at least a *plausible* meaning, if not really what the
English is saying. You're right, but that was a battle I chose not to
fight in redesigning the sentence.

>(a) `wound, make an opening in the skin';
>(b) `cause physical pain';
>(c) `have an adverse physical effect (perhaps in the long term)';
>(d) `have an adverse non-physical effect';
>(e) `cause non-physical pain'.
>
>Many's the time in recent years that I've given up watching a film
>that I had found interesting, only because the Bg translator put me
>off by choosing the wrong Bg translation of _hurt_.
>
>So what is it that the glass does not do? Does it not (a) cut the inner
>surface of your mouth etc., (b) cause pain in any of your organs, or (c)
>do something bad for you, as eg smoking does?
>
>I'd say (c) (and the contributor of the Bg translation on that page
>thinks so too, although he has used a word that I consider obsolete
>-- I don't use it, anyway).

Yeah, (c) would be my reading too.

>> 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
>
>To my ears this sounds like `it doesn't wound me', and will do so until
>I'm very explicitly told that it shouldn't. Perhaps it is the prominent
>Russian participation (60% of the gismu hooking to _ran-_ `wound', which
>can't mean either (b) or (c)). Looks like hooks can hook both ways.

Yes, I'll buy that reading. But as I said, I'll accept it even though it's
not quite in accord with the English because I wasn't really trying to fix
that particular problem. Hrm, is {xrani} really at odds with (c)?

>[email-masked] wrote:
>> The perversity of English is such that, for some verbs, "can" means
>> "actually do," e.g., "I can see clearly now" and so for.
>
>Worse, it commonly means `can safely'. The first sentence actually
>contains the meaning of the second one as well. `Can you drink now?'
>is a reasonable thing to ask someone who is known to have been
>undergoing some treatment that temporarily ruled out alcohol; and
>the answer `I can' would imply `it won't hurt me if I do'.
>I suspect, however, that in Lojban {ka'e} may mean `be physically
>able to commit the act, whatever the consequences', and if so,
>{mi ka'e citka loi blaci} would seem trivially true.

Indeed, that's why the English winds up in two clauses: the first clause
includes the second *among* its meanings, and we explicitly say the second
just in case it didn't come across.

I've been wondering about {ka'e} myself. A language like Lojban should
really have a whole lot more in the way of "can" words. Things like "be
physically able," "be prepared, with equipment or emotions," "be legally
allowed to," etc. The first and third are probably the main and most
notably disparate meanings.

~mark