Subject: Re: [lojban] Help with fiction

From: Robin Lee Powell <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 16:21:40 -0400

>A secret society calls themselves "Information Cabal". They
>believe basically in "information wants to be free" and for
>most of this century they collect and redistribute information,
>while they cultivate computers, the hacker culture and the
>Internet.
>
>This is a world very similar to our own, but with lots of
>secret societies running stuff in the background - call it
>conspiracy theory fiction if you wish :-)
>
>The Information Cabal believes in universal languages and some
>of its members spend a good portion of the century researching
>and pushing them. Until one of those languages was "ready",
>they used English for all internal communications.
>
>Recently they decided lojban is the language they want, and
>decided to switch to it. Consequently, they will change their
>name to something in lojban.

Fiction point: lojban is a _very_ bad language to use for obfuscation
(bacuse of the audio-visual isomorphism and existence of machine
parsers), and cabals usually want to keep things secret.

>That's where I'm stuck :-)
>
>The closest bridi to "information" in this sense is {datni},
>but even then I'm not very sure about how to use.

I would use 'se djuno', myself.

>And how to express "cabal"? I can't find something that
>abstractly refers to a group in this meaning - perhaps if there
>was such a bridi, I could use "secret society" (secret group).
>But {girzu} sounds different to me...
>
>{mipri girzu}? {sivni girzu}?

I can think of two different ways to gandle thisg:

cirza mipri girsu, noting that one gloss for 'cirza' is 'mysterious'.
This is a fairly colloquial trans.

Or we could go more literal:

1ca-bal \ke-'bal, -'ba^:l\ n
[F cabale cabala, intrigue, cabal, fr. ML cabbala cabala, fr. LHeb
qabba^-la^-h, lit., received (lore)]
(1614)
1: a number of persons secretly united to bring about an overturn or
usurpation esp. in public affairs
2: the artifices and intrigues of such a group
syn see PLOT

2cabal vi ca-balled; ca-bal-ling
(1680)
:to unite in or form a cabal

Trans: daspo jecta girzu

-Robin

-- 
http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rlpowell/ BTW, I'm male, honest.
... stripped of our uniqueness as human beings by Darwin, exposed to our
own inadequacies by Freud, ... Power -- "the ability to bring about our
desires" -- is all that we have left. --- Michael Korda, _Power!_