Posted by Irgend Jemand on 8:48 9/29/01
In reply to: Cadhinor through the ages posted by Mark Rosenfelder on 21:50 9/28/01
Apparently, early Cadhinor deceoran meant simply "having sex with a woman or girl one isn't married to" and the language, like many pre-modern cultures, cared about wether sex was ok by the society's rules or not, but not that much about wether the woman agreed. (Judging from the formulation, it was apparently not relevant to the writers wether it was rape or seduction in modern Western terms, allthough I guess it's pretty clear from the context that it was rape). So I'd like to know wether it's the same with Verdurian stupen, or wether that word actually means the same as English rape.
Also, why is the girl in that text still called gina "girl"? Apparently, Cadhinor had a different attitude on that than Verdurian, wich, as far as I've heard, calls every female who has her redel behind her redelcë, "woman". Talking of that, when you invented redel, did you derive it from German Regel, or is that just change?
Deceoran is literally 'to be impure', or in the dynamic tenses, 'to make impure'. You're right that the judges would not have made much of a distinction between rape and seduction-- if Opogaros's daughter was willing, Ravoberac's crime would be the same.
Verdurians do make a distinction between acoturen 'seduce' and stupen 'rape'. The individual matters more in Verduria than in ancient Cadhinas, and the crime against the woman is recognized.
Redelcë is a general term, replacing Cadhinor saea; a young woman is gina in Cadhinor, frälina in Verdurian. The latter word (but not redel, so far as I recall) is stolen from German... it took me years to think of a native derivation (it's now related to frälir 'to bloom').