Could PRAY GET be “give over”? It’s not a common phrasing, but unless I’m looking in the wrong place, it is supported by default in Inform 6.
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I definitely prefer this solution to a third mystery synonym!
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I don’t think ‘give over’ is very likely, though I don’t have any other good guesses.
My only thought here is that this scene reminds me of the bit in Zork where you can give the jeweled egg to the thief, who will open it if you can’t. In this case, it seems to me like the dwarf is taking something valuable-to-them out of something, which makes the thing it came out of valuable to you. Does anyone have a different idea of what might be going on?
I read this as: initially, the dwarf tries to threaten us. After losing its axe and failing to hurt us with the knife, it backs down as far as “Give me my weapon, and I’ll leave.” We don’t give the axe back, but give the dwarf something else it wants, and it decides to cut its losses and leave. (I think the theory that LIGHAN SE DIGROGI PISE SE COAS is “grabs the DIGROGI out of the air”, implying that we threw the DIGROGI to the dwarf, offers the most compelling translation of COAS, which has otherwise not been mentioned anywhere in the transcript.)
The departing dwarf is described as MRONSOR NO ASKIOSI. ASKIOSI is presumably “thankful” as the adjective form of ASKIOSY “thanks”. NO is some kind of a conjunction, but we don’t have many of those that aren’t already assigned to another word in the transcript language. My best guess is “yet”, as in “the dwarf leaves, looking embarrassed yet thankful” or “looking guilty yet thankful” - the implication being that the dwarf feels that it “should” have fought us, but finding itself outclassed, was happy to get away whatever we gave it, which is therefore some sort of bribe?
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I do still agree with evouga that PISE works better as “from” than “out of”, especially since it maintains the one-word-to-one-word mapping that (most of) the transcript follows. But “grabs the DIGROGI from the air” is fine English too.
As a side note, the DIGROGI is in our initial inventory, so presumably something we brought to the caves with us. Which makes me think it’s not a treasure—the Elvish sword makes sense, but who brings gold and jewels to a dragon’s lair? Giving food to a hostile-but-hungry monster appears in both Adventure and Zork I (and is a suboptimal solution in Adventureland), but this dwarf doesn’t seem like they’d be placated by something as simple as a meal.
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If I was to indulge the idea that it’s a pun DIG-ROGI (dig rock) should be a spade or pickaxe
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For SISO SEDAN, you LERUO the axe and knife DURII.
Even though the nature of the LERUO remains unclear, I’m pretty confident in our earlier thoughts that SISO SEDAN = “good measure,” e.g.
- SISO = “measure”
- SEDAN = “good”
and almost certainly
- DURII = “too” (or “also”).
When we fix the issue with the smoke:
Your GORNY INCAN SEDANI FUI SLAS.
So SEDANI = “better” perhaps? Also in the dragon’s dying attack,
In one FOBREL SLARI, it OAWUL out a spell which SITIN like ALL ZAOKNEB.
SLARI here seems to mean “final” or “last”; is SLAS related? E.g. “Your lungs feel better at last?” (Of course, “at” is already accounted for.)
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SEDAN=“good” seems strongly indicated and I can well believe that SEDANI=“better”. FIU feels like it should be related to FI, which appears only once:
FI TA VUPRAM E KUI POLISHY APPLE LERULI (probably, something like “one of them bears a few POLISHY APPLE LERULI” - we have VUPRABEN=“bearer” from the stock certificate)
But this makes FI “of them”, which is not the kind of construction we’ve seen represented by a single word so far. And words related to “them” should probably begin with a V, given VA=“it”, VAL=“its” (possessive), VALY=“their” (probably).
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Yes, FI is a puzzle. It could be:
- A preposition; in which case the POLISHY are the subject of the sentence (“Beside one lie a few POLISHY”). But I agree that VUPRAM is almost certainly “holds” or “bears” which strongly suggests that the subject is the “one.”
- An (anomalously placed) adjective like “just” or “only.”
- A conjunction like “yet”; this option would require BLONG or DREIP to mean something like “plain” or “featureless.”
Finally, FI seems like it should be related to FIRE = “all.”
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Ooh, what about “each”? “Each one bears…”
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Yes! I like that a lot.
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(note typo corrected: FUI → FIU)
Could this be “your lungs feel better with each breath”? But that would require FIU to be a weird compound of two English words, which isn’t the way this language otherwise seems to work.
I briefly got excited about this because I thought that if SLAS is “breath” then FOBREL SLARI could be “dying breath”, but SLARI is clearly the adjective so that doesn’t seem to work.
It could be the text elides the “with”?
Your lungs feel better each breath
is acceptable to my ear.
It could also be that SLAS is a unit of time, e.g.
Your lungs feel better every second.
Oh, I can definitely get behind FI=“each” and FIU=“every”. But then if SLAS is “second” or “moment”, is the resemblance between SLAS and SLARI just coincidence?
Well, if SLAS is “moment”, SLARI could be “momentary”, but I can’t quite think of what single word would slot into “with one momentary ____” (as opposed to something like “burst of strength”—which of course a natural language could well have a single word for, but as you’ve been saying, Lionese seems unlikely to).
What about SLARI being “momentous”?
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Oh, I like that better!
FI=“each”, FIU=“every”, SLAS=“moment” and SLARI=“momentous” feel sufficiently compelling that I’ve added them to the translated transcript.
We’re definitely at the point where progress is getting stickier; most of the other translation attempts I’ve seen gave up somewhere around this point or earlier. Having untangled the dwarf’s dialogue (which was a more contrived task than I remembered; lucky we had @lpsmith to guide us!) there’s no longer anything else I remember from any previous attempts at translating the text that I’m holding back on.
But, I think there is one sentence which, if we could find a sufficiently convincing translation which is consistent with everything else in the transcript, could more or less unlock the whole thing, and it’s this one:
All sititin on lamb milga zao, mefalo zaol volt switch iskoleb pe zaolb buely.
Putting in the words we’re pretty certain of, that’s:
ALL SITITIN and LAMB around you, MEFALO your VOLT with ISKOLEB of your own BUELY.
(ZAOLB fits better as “your own” in its other two uses than any alternative that’s been suggested. MILGA is definitely a preposition of some kind and “around” seems to make sense everywhere else. The other translated words are as near certain as we’re likely to get.)
I’m particularly interested in this sentence because almost all of the untranslated words appear elsewhere in the text.
ALL is used as an adjective (in the mysterious TAKE ALL, the FREZY ALL which come out of it and the SLEEP ALL which we eventually place it in) but seems to be used as a noun in ALL ZAOKNEB and this sentence.
SITITIN appears in the first area when we cast the DANCE spell: “The flames SITITINO POORVO as the WOVEL LEID PUPLEN”. This is another of those strange constructions of two -O words in a row (like HALO YOSO) which may indicate some grammatical rule we’ve not deciphered. It’s also not implausible that SITITIN is related to SITIN, which appears in “the dragon howls out a spell which SITIN like ALL ZAOKNEB”.
LAMB is used in participle form in SILEMI ZATHAL LAMBO (“ZATHAL LAMBO crystals”), which appear on the walls of the crystal cavern. Since THALN is “point”, we have speculated that ZATHAL might refer to pointy objects such as stalactites or stalagmites. We also see ZATHAL HAMEBO in the other part of the crystal cavern.
MEFAL is what the smoke does to the pit, probably some synonym for “fills”. We currently have TOKEN for “filled” but MEFALO could be e.g. “flooding”.
VOLT is in the description of the pit: “a wide pit which CARAB OLET PARO the VOLTO”. OLET may be related to OLT (“high”).
BUELY is something affected by the smoke in the first area: “your BUELY are SHAIMOO”. Based on the suggestion that THALSHAIM may be “spikes”, @Draconis suggested that SHAIMOO could be “stinging”, which would indicate BUELY might be “eyes”.
ISKOLEB is a hapax, but if we can find something that makes sense with all of those other words, I’m hoping it might become obvious.
Finally, from context, it looks like “ALL SITITIN and LAMB around you, MEFALO your VOLT with ISKOLEB of your own BUELY” is probably a bad thing to have happen to us; it looks like it’s the result of the dragon’s death-curse, and we escape the situation only by using a magic word.
I believe it’s been suggested that ALL could be “magic”, “water”, “light” or possibly even “oil”, but I can’t come up with an interpretation based on any of those which satisfies all of the constraints above. Unless I’ve overlooked a suggestion, the only idea for “ISKOLEB of your own BUELY” was something like “images of your own eyes”, if the ALL involves light so bright that it causes our adventurer to see silhouettes of their own retinal patterns. But I don’t get the sense that others found that interpretation particularly compelling.
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I think the evidence is strong that BUELY are:
- Something closely attached to us
- Something that we have multiple of
- Something generally referred to together instead of individually
- Something that reacts negatively to smoke, more and more over time
I can’t think of any options for this except “eyes” and “lungs”. And since all the same logic holds for GORNY, that must be the other.
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