Re: CHAT: Universal Declaration of Human Rights

>On Sat, 15 Apr 2000, Irina Rempt wrote:
>
>>On Sat, 15 Apr 2000, Sally Caves wrote:
>>
>>> How many of you conlangers are going to do this, really?
>>
>>I'm not; it's too twentieth-century political, too culture-bound, and
>>I don't want to take the risk of it changing Valydan beyond
>>recognition and repair. Same as I don't translate from the Bible on
>>principle (well, I did "let there be light" but the explanation was
>>easily ten times as long as the phrase).
>
>I agree here. There's no cultural or political basis for it to make
>any sense in Talarian. What would "human rights" mean when you're one
>out of a number of races?
Same problem for the Tokana.  Concepts such as "human rights"
and "equality" are extremely Western, and would be rather foreign
to the Tokana, who have a small-scale kinship-based social structure
with government (if you could call it that) based on consent, and a
power hierarchy based on prestige.

Matt.