Adopted from the I Can Eat Glass Project - http://hcs.harvard.edu/~igp/glass.html
A
As I think about the Lojban entry, it's always bothered me. I've written to the maintainer of the web page for this project about this; might as well share it here.
Trouble is, the Lojban entry as given (mi ka'e citka loi blaci .i la'edi'u na xrani mi) means something like "I can eat glass, and that fact (that I can eat glass) doesn't injure me." That is, it's the ability to eat glass that doesn't hurt, not the actual doing of it. That's not what the original source sentence means. I think the Lojban should actually be something like mi ka'e citka loi blaci .i le nu ca'a go'i na xrani mi. That uses a special marker meaning "the event of actually doing it." Actually, it probably should be lo'e nu ca'a go'i there, but that's another question altogether.
The 'project' went even further, defining the manner that a body'd use to say this in colloquial French, and in a few different types of archaic verse. That site is very informative and almost obscure to the point of uselessness, I'd say.
Re: Albert Herring's comments. I stand corrected.
Nuke goes here, I guess.
Don't speak with your mouth full
Especially not if it's full of glass. You might hurt yourself.
DJuxtaposition's position is flawed. The French construction savoir + infinitive is a far more general way of saying I/you/it can do something, rather than just meaning "know how to do sthg". However, assuming that you have eaten glass before, the English modal "can" could safely be dropped completely (cf. "Can you speak English?" "Vous parlez français?"). Straight "Je peux" is less common than you might think. The "cela", meanwhile, would only be taken as referring to the eating of glass, not knowing how to do so as suggested ("ceci" might do that, though).
However, in general French doesn't really go for writing two sentences with a semantic link without putting some kind of connector in there to make it patently bleeding obvious and somewhat wordier. Thus you'd be more likely to pass as a local with:
You might also wish to be aware that "verre" is a homophone for "ver", so there is a risk that people will think that you eat worms rather than glass. You must judge for yourself whether this is likely to reduce the effectiveness of the gambit.
The informal and more common way of saying "I can eat glass" would most likely be "aku bisa makan gelas", which is literally, word for word, "I can eat glass". If you were to attempt this, I would probably say "hati-hati" which means "be careful" but literally translates into "heart, heart".
I'd include pronunciation charts, but if you speak English you're probably pronouncing it right, the same rules apply to Indonesian that apply in English for the most part.
printable version chaos
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