Ah. In Brian Campbell’s review of The Edifice on IFDB:
The puzzle that makes the game is the language puzzle, in which the player must learn to communicate in the foreign language of an NPC. It is hard to describe, without giving spoilers, why this puzzle is so much fun, but I’ve found that it’s simply the most satisfying puzzle of any game I’ve played.
Seems like a playthrough of The Edifice may be in order.
Ok, I’m back from playing through half of The Edifice and puzzling out a third conlang… 
I guess what follows is spoilers for a main puzzle of The Edifice:
There is definitely similarity between the dwarf’s language and the language of The Edifice, though unfortunately there is very little shared vocabulary.
The dwarf’s dialog:
Sti alvenk, er fi akne sti!
Fi ulk lobo!
Arenk fi fo undi! Fi alvenk!
Fi y ifisink
In The Edifice, NA/NE is “me”/“my”, FA/FE is “you”/“your”, AKNE is “sick”, and Y is “no.” None of the other words are recognized by the stranger/friend.
I’m not sure what to make of this. Even accounting for a vowel shift in the millennia(?) between the two games, I don’t really buy FI/FO as “you”/“your”; I prefer STI = “you”, FI = “I”/“me”, FO = “my”.
I do like Y = “no”, though (e.g. “I no understand”).
And indeed! You have cracked the code.
The issue was that Zarf intended to use Edifice’s ‘Nalian’ for the dwarf’s language, asked if there was a reference somewhere, and was pointed to a file called ‘nalian.inf’ on gmd, which I had released as source code, since there was a reasonable amount of interest in how it was done.
What zarf (and, perhaps, the person who told him about the file) didn’t know was that in the interest of letting people look at the source without getting spoiled for the game itself, I had swapped all the words out in ‘nalian.inf’ for a completely different vocabulary. So instead of referencing a reasonably well-known game, Lighan instead referenced a ridiculously obscure code example. Which we managed to figure out in the end anyway, but even I didn’t recognize it at first.
But here it is!
https://ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform6/examples/contributions/nalian.inf
The vocabulary is near the end; if you search for ‘MyVerb’ you’ll find:
MyVerb → v_is “ulk”
with name ‘ulk’;
and from there the rest of the words.
Aha! In which case we have:
is ulk
yes a
no y
give arenk
take isink
leave alvenk
threaten issulk
understand ifisink
see arenk
mine fo
your sto
his ro
good iflo
bad aslo
strange farro
dangerous lobo
I fi
you sti
it ri
hut raki
weapon undi
panther lobradi
revelation kralni
(I can’t seem to figure out how to turn this into a nice Discourse table…)
Ok, I see now what you meant by the reference being more obscure than originally intended! Thanks for the hints!
“Arenk” appears in the table twice, but from context it’s clear the dwarf means “give.”
Which would turn the dwarf’s dialogue:
Sti alvenk, er fi akne sti!
Fi ulk lobo!
Arenk fi fo undi! Fi alvenk!
Fi y ifisink
Into:
You leave, or I ??? you!
I am dangerous!
Give me my weapon! I leave!
I don’t understand…
AKNE is “sick”, so in the context of the first line it means “harm” or “hurt.”
Ah! I see there are vocab words used in the game that aren’t in that section of the code. Yeah, “attack”, “hurt”, “kill” all make sense there semantically, so “hurt” seems fine.
Yeah, in addition to translating a 24-year-old puzzle, we’re also discovering 28-year old code example bugs But yes, ‘akne’ was ‘sick’ in the original Nalian.
I also hadn’t noticed that Zarf added ‘er’ to the language, so that’s kind of fun.
This also means that the GET MOUSE, also known as the DIGROGI and the DIGROGI AJUA MOUSE, is the dwarf’s weapon. None of those words appears outside these three uses (all referring to the same object—GET MOUSE in a command, DIGROGI in a description, DIGROGI AJUA MOUSE in the inventory), so we can only speculate as to what that weapon is.
But it belongs to the dwarf, and isn’t an axe, knife, or sword (if our other identifications are correct). In terms of fantasy referents, the first Adventure dwarf uses an axe, as does Gimli (probably not coincidentally); I’m having trouble thinking of other weapons classically associated with dwarves. Maybe a hammer?
Another possibility is that the dwarf originally wanted their weapons back, but settled for the DIGROGI instead. (Bag of coins e.g.; though a literal “bag of gold” doesn’t work for multiple grammatical reasons.)
Ah, that would make more sense, since the player just grabbed the axe when the dwarf said that. DIGROGI AJUA MOUSE being NOUN PREPOSITION NOUN would definitely fit (maybe with GET being a synonym for DIGROGI), but what simple English prepositions do we not have yet?
I guess one more thing so it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle: the AMUSING thing to ask the dwarf about is “revelation.”
I haven’t played The Edifice (though I really should); what is the “revelation” in this section? Is it the macguffin phrase you need to learn, or does it literally mean the act of revealing something?
In the game you ask for something more concrete. The “revelation” seems to have been created for the code sample.
I’m puzzled about the role of the word GET. Since it’s only used in the player’s command, it must be a really-obvious synonym for one of DIGROGI or AJUA?
It could also be a determiner like “some.”
EDIT: Or maybe even a pronoun? If you type “give him MOUSE,” will Inform write the “(to the dwarf)”?
That would make sense, although we currently have KURI=“some” (which I feel good about because of the resemblance between KURI=“some” and E KUI=“a few”). Is there another determiner that fits in context?
In both Adventure and Zork, the player finds a bag of food to take with them near the start of the game, right? Could that be what we end up giving to the dwarf?
If I were the dwarf, I’d be more disgruntled than grateful at trading my best axe for a bag lunch. But maybe we shouldn’t rely too heavily on sensible economic systems in old-school dungeon crawlers…
If you specify the indirect object (whether it’s a pronoun or not), by default, Inform won’t print the “(to the dwarf)” message. So GET has to be part of the noun phrase (or I suppose the verb?).