Let's Translate: Lighan ses Lion by Andrew Plotkin

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So this one is going to require some explaining …

In April 2001, Emily Short announced on rec.arts.int-fiction that she had unexpectedly received, by telegram, a walkthrough for an unidentified work of interactive fiction, and solicited submissions of a game or transcript thereof which would match it.

The provided walkthrough in its telegrammatic style was not exactly straightforward to parse:

HERE IS WALKTHROUGH YOU REQUESTED STOP YOU WILL SEE WHAT TO DO STOP THINK STOP X UPHOLSTER SEAT ZRBLM TAKE ALL N LISTEN FOLKS DRAW SWORD WAVE FAN DANCE ABOUT PAINT FENCE TAKE NEXT TURN SMOOTH DUCK DOWN ANESTHETI I EAT IT UNLOCK DOOR SWITCH PLOVER EGG STAND ON EAST SWING KNIFE LION PRAY GET MOUSE Z NW WAKE FISH SWIM DRINK DRINK READ LOOK UP DRESS BOOK SHIP PACKAGE PRESENT BOWL DROP TOY SLEEP PLAY STRING PICK POLISH APPLE EYE MIRROR POSE UNDO TRIM CORSET PUT GREY ON BLUE STAKE LIGHT FIRE HELP MAN STATION STOP WATCH XYZZY

A number of excellent games and transcripts were submitted in response; the one which will concern our attention in this thread was the work of one Andrew Plotkin, and I will not attempt to outdo Emily’s explanation of the premise:

… oh. Emily had a lovely explanation of the premise, which I can no longer retrieve because the Wayback Machine is down, but it revolved around the theory that Zarf has access to an extradimensional library containing all the IF which ever has been written, will be written, or could be written, and so he simply picked the first transcript which matched the provided walkthrough despite the fact that it’s written in a completely alien language which just so happens to have a winning transcript composed of words spelled identically to a bunch of English words even though every other word in said language looks like nonsense …

At this point, you should probably take a look at the transcript.

One can’t play Lighan ses Lion, of course, because the transcript is the only thing that exists, but a text like this has an implicit puzzle right there for the solving. I’d thought previously about trying to do a Let’s Play (well, Let’s Translate) of this one, but the recent excitement about translation puzzles in the Iron Chef pilot convinced me that now is the time.

So here’s the plan: I’m going to put up a work-in-progress translation of the game and add to it every few days, with the assistance of as many forum denizens as want to chip in. There are plenty of people here with significantly more linguistics chops than I, but I’ll do my best to keep things moving forwards if we stall out. There have been prior translation attempts at the text, but I won’t be referring to them in the course of this thread and I’ll do what I can to ignore any of their conclusions that I might remember in order to come at this fresh.

I should also note that I don’t think the translation can be fully “solved”: there is plenty that can be deciphered, but some words lack context to draw a firm conclusion (fun fact: Emily Short’s comments on this transcript were where I originally learned the phrase hapax legomenon). So if we conclude that there’s no evidence either way as to whether we should translate re’em as rhinoceros or unicorn (picking a totally arbitrary example from a different context), I’ll put it to a vote in the thread.

(Edited to add a link to the in-progress translation)

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I’m not going to post any translation thoughts of my own right away, because there are plenty of low-hanging fruit in the transcript and I don’t want to deprive anyone else of the chance to point anything out too quickly, but just look at how much vocab (and maybe grammar) we can infer from this:

LIGHAN SES LION
E loid wea el Zarf.
(Tant-moose loovany halo yoso “think”.)
Zropse 19 / Aceba seul 570109 / Thinak z6.21 Nasaberg 6/10

Garst Nith
Zao bi ercio pase e garst nith dus carab olet paro se volto. Ro se ilsh, se garst ithi.

E rax pe seat jeolo lede ract zaol bem ilsh.

Zao oxol e erci pe anestheti inlark on e falok wea corran (falno e take all) pla.

>THINK
LIGHAN SES LION bi e “andi” loid, el se Zarfi Stopo Molk. Zao hral sabra swinth yarco, on zao hral acrot firdan sabral swinth awordo va lark ghorn.

Askiosy ro kaol kyuay-bant, Statenpaker Belford on Lukehart Amy. On askiosy ro Emily rau shado seis marghensi.

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written in a completely alien language which just so happens to have a winning transcript composed of words spelled identically to a bunch of English words

Twenty years later, I uncorked a similar theory to apply to John M. Ford’s unfinished novel Aspects. I asserted (and still assert) that it is written in an imaginary language which just so happens to have every word identical to English, both in spelling and in meaning.

(But they all have different etymologies, derived from the ancestral languages of that fantasy world.)

This has nothing to do with the translation problem at hand. I was just reminded of the connection, which I had never thought about before. (Aspects was not published until 2022; I had forgotten about the paragraph quoted above.)

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This looks like a pretty English-adjacent syntax, but I think maybe verbs aren’t inflected, at least not for person (unclear about tense so far)? I think “zao” is probably “you” and “bi” is “is/to be”, and we have both “Zao bi…” (presumably second-person) and “LIGHAN SES LION bi…” (definitely third-person).

“Loid” is obviously “game”, and “THINK” is clearly “ABOUT”. Contemplating what we would normally see in ABOUT text like this, I’m going to guess that the second paragraph reads “Thanks to my playtesters, Statenpaker Belford and Lukehart Amy. And thanks to Emily for…” (could be a number of things, like “running this event” or “providing this walkthrough”). “Ro” meaning “to” and “on” meaning “and” are helpful for the location descriptions above. Also if “kaol” is “my”, “zaol” is probably “your”.

If this were a full-on conlang kind of situation, I wouldn’t assume direct word-to-word correspondences like this (either in the sense of “every word in this text should be translated as exactly one English word” or like “a word that means ‘to’ in one context will be best translated as ‘to’ in every context”—with prepositions and preposition-equivalents especially, that’s a bad assumption for most language pairs). But for an off-the-cuff kind of thing created by a native English speaker who’s not a linguist, I don’t think it’s a bad place to start.

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Accurate. :)

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Ha! I had stumbled across WalkthroughComp just days ago and thought it was a concept worth revisiting. (There are links there to Emily’s original r.a.if post, an IF Archive zipfile of the submissions, and a web page about it via the Wayback Machine, except the Wayback Machine is suffering an outage at the moment…)

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I got lucky with the Wayback Machine link, so here is what Emily said:

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ABOUT is the most common meta-verb for this sort of thing, certainly, but since the banner text says “Thinak z6.21 Nasaberg 6/10” for “Inform v6.21 Library 6/10”, am I off-base in suggesting that maybe THINK should be INFO?

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I’ve never seen INFO used that way (that I recall) so it didn’t occur to me, but you’re probably right. (It did occur to me that ABOUT isn’t always the metaverb in question, but the alternative I could think of was CREDITS, which seemed less likely.)

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I’m posting my translation-in-progress at this link.

So far all I’ve put in is the handful of obvious pronouns, conjunctions and prepositions which @EJoyce pointed out (“you” for “zao”, “your” for “zaol”, “my” for “kaol”, “is” for “bi” - although some of those should possibly become “are” when we identify the plural words - “to” for “ro”, “and” for “on”, “the” for “se” and “a” for “e”). But if you take a look you should see that the structure of sentences starts looking a lot more legible even if the actual content is still a mystery!

(I’ve put the source text and translation side-by-side, with unknown words in the translation capitalised, which is a convention I remember seeing somewhere. If you view it on a small screen it should collapse down to a single column with each paragraph followed by its translation. If any linguists want to suggest a better way of doing this, I’m all ears! I’ll also happily accept any improvements to my extremely basic CSS.)

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I am not a linguist, but I’d suggest switching the colours in the translation, so that the translated words stand out.

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We can also get “release” (zropse), “serial” (aceba), and “number” (seul) from the banner text, though of those I think only “number” is likely to be useful to us.

The rest of the text has some things that are close to Inform default responses, but not quite. Brackets show text that would be there in a default Inform 6 game.

You oxol a erci pe anestheti inlark and a falok wea corran (falno a take all) pla.

You [can also] see a ??? and a ??? (containing a ???) here.
oxol = see, falno = containing, pla = here

Your stop is 0 thalny pise a koobar 8. Seis pray you the korb pe Ligani Uctoe.

Your score is 0 points out [of] a total [of] 8. This gives you the rank of ??? ???.
stop = score, thalny = points, koobar = total, seis = this, pray = gives, korb = rank/title, pe = of

[Your stop bien bisylen neat el ta thaln.]

Your score has gone up/down by one point.
Must be singular because thalny is the plural, therefore “one” must be the number.
bien = has, bisylen = gone, el = by, ta = one, thaln = point

\ >ZRBLM TAKE ALL
(pise the falok)
You egg the take pise the falok.

> TAKE ??? ???
(from the ???)
You ??? the ??? from the ???.
pise = from, zrblm = take

I think this is taking rather than putting for a few reasons: the TAKE ALL is mentioned in the room description as being (something) the FALOK, and pise also appears in the score message, where “from” makes sense and “on/in” doesn’t.

LIGHAN SES LION is a “andi” loid, el the Zarfi Stopo Molk. You hral sabra swinth yarco, and you hral acrot firdan sabral swinth awordo va lark ghorn.

??? is a “???” game, by the Zarfian Cruelty Scale. You…???
more evidence that el = by!

> XYZZY
Askiosy rau loovao LIGHAN SES LION!
[Dress sle nire ve-station]

> QUIT
Thanks for playing LIGHAN SES LION!
[Press any key to exit]
ve- = infinitive verb

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Building off this, you might also increase the contrast—I didn’t realize the words were different colors until David brought it up!

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I was honestly just coming back to post about STOP == SCORE and I find this tract :smiley:

I think I could be more help if I knew Inform better, but I don’t

Having said that, from the banner line, I assume

E loid wea el Zarf.

Gives us el = by, and also tells us either that loid is singular or E is actually an

Assuming the default text isn’t changed, loid would mean interactive and wea fiction, however it makes the following dubious:

LIGHAN SES LION bi e “andi” loid, el se Zarfi Stopo Molk

“is a(n) “Andi” interactive, by the Zarfi Stopo Molk” doesn’t make a lot of sense

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More broadly, it looks like -en is used to form the past tense and past participle of verbs: we see both bi and bien, and bi seems to be in present contexts while bien is in past contexts. We also see bisylen and eggen in places where we’d expect a participle.

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Why do I feel this would be easier with (a) a live chat and (b) a translation on a wiki that multiple people could edit

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I won’t have time to post another full update until tomorrow at the earliest, but you might want to consider that the TAKE ALL mentioned in the initial room description is referred to in most subsequent messages simply as TAKE, suggesting that TAKE is the noun head. I think this language has postpositive (is that the right word?) adjectives.

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Funnily enough, that was just suggested to me elsewhere :smiley:

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Zaol stop bi 0 thalny pise e koobar 8

I’m taking a leap to suggest this is “Your score is 0 out of a possible 8”.

It’s a change to the default wording (You have so far scored 0 out of a possible 25, in 1 turn.), but perfectly cromulent, and I’m imagining the default wording might be different for different versions?

It would give us, zaol = your, thalny = out, pise = of, koobar = possible. (assuming no adjective order is in force for “out of”).

A quick scan suggests that the translation of PISE as of definitely fits all the other places it is in use.

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Mm, I don’t like that for “thalny” because of “Zaol stop bien bisylen neat el ta thaln.” I think Draconis is right that “thaln” is singular “point” and “thalny” is the plural.