I’m pretty sure I know the reference that @lpsmith is referring to, and it’s nothing that’s become relevant yet. I was planning to put off working on that particular part of the transcript for a while just to give anyone who might happen to spot it the opportunity for a moment of insight!
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Yeah, that seems reasonable; I’ll hold off for the nonce 
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Zao gu-kounam ve WIVLENT, MUGRENT e loid neglonen, oxol zaol STOP, help kuri WATCH hepy sogo, os XYZZY?
This is a standard library message and so we know it must be:
Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, give the FULL score for that game, see some suggestions for AMUSING things to do, or QUIT?
We immediately get:
- WIVLENT = restart
- MUGRENT = restore
- NEGLON = save
- WATCH = amusing
From WIVLE’s use earlier in the transcript we can fairly confidently infer
- -ENT suffix = again
- WIVLE = start
Restore as literally “store again” doesn’t really make sense in the context of retrieving a save game from disk, and so it’s unlikely that the word would have the same etymology in Lionesque. It’s guesswork at this point but I might hazard:
- MUGRE = create? copy?
“Amusing” is a verb participle in English; it’s unclear if the same is true in Lionesque or if WATCH is a bona fide adjective, though by analogy to SWING / SWINGO / SWITCH one might guess
WANG = amuse-TCH suffix = verb participle
Note that the standard library prompts the player to ask about the FULL score, not the SCORE. There is no support, as far as I can tell, for printing a message about just the SCORE in the Inform 6/10 standard library. So either Lighan is using customized score-handling code (was there a popular such Inform extension?) or Zarf misquoted the standard library message from memory.
SOG is again a case where Lighan is inconsistent with the 6/10 standard library: the standard library verb is do, but from context elsewhere in the transcript (including the response to WATCH below) it’s fairly clear that
- SOG = try
We can also reasonably infer
- GU- = interrogative marker
- HEP = thing
KOUNAM and HELP both appear in the HELP MAN line so we may get more hints there about their meaning. They’re clearly both verbs, with something along the lines of KOUNAM = want/suggest and HELP = see/ask/inquire. -AM might be a suffix.
KURI appears nowhere else in the text but probably
- KURI = some
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That looks right; -o is the present participle. So I am wrong about WATCH (maybe “amusing” is a simple adjective in this language).
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I hadn’t picked up on this; are there any other instances where we can get anything useful from noticing an -ent suffix?
“Wivle” = “start” gives us a couple of messages which suggest unfolding trouble for our protagonist:
- Zaol gorny wivle ve-seag. Zao kawk. (“Your gorny start to seag. You kawk.”)
- Zaol gorny bi hobii wivleo ve-storn. (“Your gorny are hobii starting to storn.”)
I’ve gone back and put in the prepositions (“pase” = “in/into”, “pise” = “out/out of”, “pose”=“on”, “pe”=“of” and “rau”=“for”) as well as “pla”=“here”. In doing that last one I also noticed the word “gupla”:
Gupla se corset jololen, zao oxol …
Since gu- appears to be a question prefix, I’m strongly inclined to think this is “where”.
I also put in “erci”=“stand” (and more commonly, “ercio”=“standing”), which I expected to be straightforward, but we also have “erci” as a noun:
Zao oxol e erci pe anestheti inlark …
“Stand” is a noun in English (“a stand of trees”, etc.) so it could be the same thing here?
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A typo is always a possibility (I was also suspicious of “crolimen” being a typo for “croimen”, except that it appears twice) - but this transcript did get a fair amount of attention when it was first released, and the author’s website mentions some errors already having been reported and corrected. (And since we’ve seen @zarf in this thread already, hopefully he might let us know if we really do uncover an error.)
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I definitely do not remember the setup well enough to identify errors. You’re on your own.
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Other possible uses PRES-ENT, WOR-ENT.
RE- is a particle meaning back/again, and I suspect -ENT should literally be translated as that particle, rather than again. STORE AGAIN doesn’t really make sense RE-STORE does. This would suggest that particles might have their order reversed with respect to English just like adjective order.
The reversal isn’t total, though. -o = -ing, -y = plural and -nt = cardinality all follow an English order.
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Since the possibility of a typo does seem to be on the table, I do think it’s possible that askiosi is “thanks”, since it comes up after you give something to the door (which is a person or some sort of speaking, animate being), and is the last thing before they leave.
Looking at the door bit some more, I’m thinking va is a pronoun, but it seems to be used for both animate and inanimate nouns, so it would have to be translated as either “it” or “they” depending on context.
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Yikes, we have worol, worolob, worent and wornki all as potentially-related words then and at the moment I don’t know what any of them mean! And presnel to go with present (the latter of which at least has some contextual clue about what it might mean …)
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Some ideas (I’m going off of Adam’s transcript, here, since I read the whole thread and promptly forgot all of it):
Likely translations
- korb: rank (“Your score is 0 points out of a possible 8. This gives you the KORB of LIGANI UCTOE.”)
- kyuay-bant: beta-testers
- Statenpaker Belford, Lukehart Amy: names of beta-testers (last first, I believe)
- nolo: are holding (inventory command)
- bisylen: just gone (in the sense of “just gone up”, recent past)
- eat: down
- fan: to read
- slunt: guarded/blocked
- light fire: take all
- neglonen: saved
- sle nire: any key
Likely types
- ilsh,
sylnaush, zernh, ilshzernh: directions - ilsh, aush, zernh, tarnh: cardinal directions
syln aush, ilshtarnh, aushtarnh, ilshzernh: ordinal directions- falno: in, on, holding, wearing
- take all/take: container, supporter
- andi: Zarfian scale rating (e.g. “merciful”)
- coas: container
- string: supporter
- gu-dwen: want/mean (disambiguation prompt)
- lighan: do something related to a container (take/remove/etc.)
Likely nouns
- rax
- bem
- dorap
- plover
- gorny
- anestheti
- door (being)
- fursen
- stand
- east
- digrogi
- torsho
- swim
- up
- package
- book
- vlop
- polishy
Likely verbs:
- nolo
- switch
- storn
- seag/seago
- kawk
- shoin
- shaimoo
- luin
- courne
- shian
- pickrobe
- fnor
- snoosto
- prono
- swingo
Likely adverbs:
- hobii
- satragii
Likely adjectives:
- look
- all
- apple
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If you look at the section of the transcript with the commands >I, >EAT, and >IT, ilshtarnh and aushtarnh also appear. I think ilsh and aush are north and south (in some order) and zernh and tarnh are east and west (in some order). I’m not sure we can determine which is which exactly.
I don’t think syln is actually part of the direction; I think it’s a verb and quite possibly related to bisylen—it might be the root form, “go”.
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I guess this boils down to the meta-question: should we consider Lighan ses Lion as written in encrypted English? Or in a natural language of its own (that happens to have a lot of grammatical similarity to English)?
The meaning of the word “restore” is quite distant from its roots, to the point that other languages are very unlikely to translate “restore” as literally re + store. (The French Inform library, for example, translates “restore a saved game” as “charger une partie sauvegardée,” using the verb “charger” = to load.)
So MUGRE probably doesn’t mean literally “to store,” unless we can assume that Lighan’s word etymologies mirror those of the corresponding English words.
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I think it’s pretty clearly meant to be its own language, but it’s also one that reflects a lot of underlying assumptions that are English-based, so it’s hard to definitively say that etymologies will be similar to English but also hard to definitively say they won’t.
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I think most of these are pretty likely. I haven’t updated the translation with everything that’s been identified yet since I want to check each one carefully in case there are any related words to highlight (for example, earlier I mentioned how translating “pla” as “here” seems obvious, but then raises the question of whether we can safely infer that “gupla” is “where”).
Yeah, there aren’t even any rooms with both ilsh and aush exits, or zernh and tarnh exits, so that we could guess they’re listed in the same order conventionally used in English.
I think we might as well pick arbitrarily which way to translate them, or else agree to leave them untranslated indefinitely. The only other case in which it might matter would be if the layout of the entire game is somehow a reference to or recreation of an area in another work of IF—but I don’t think I’ve seen anything which suggests that’s the case.
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I agree that we should pick arbitrarily for those. Add an asterisk if you like, but I don’t think we’ll ever get solid confirmation one way or another. (Did Inform 6 games have a conventional order for listing exits? I thought it was always up to the author.)
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I mean, [I6] Is it possible to list conditional exits? implies that there’s a pseudo-item Compass that can be iterated on using objectloop(direction in Compass) and that produces a set order. I believe that it goes: north, south, east, west, northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest, up, down based on DM4 §24: The world model described but I could be wrong. This does seem to correlate with what I’ve seen, though.
I couldn’t find an instance of AUSH and ILSH together, nor TARNH and ZERNH, so this is kind of a moot point.
If no one has objections, I propose the following, based purely on the my personal opinions of each word:
- aush: north
- ilsh: south
- tarnh: east
- zernh: west
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No, but English usage in general would tend to list north, south, east, west, so if we’d had a room with exits leading ilsh and aush, it’d be tempting to conclude that the former is north and the latter south. But as @Hidnook says, there’s no such room.
As per my introduction to the thread, arbitrary choices can go to a poll!
- Ilsh = north, aush = south
- Aush = north, ilsh = south
0
voters
- Zernh = east, tarnh = west
- Tarnh = east, zernh = west
0
voters
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Wow … those votes are not helping 
If you can’t decide, you could translate as (say) ilsh=“southnorth”, aush=“northsouth”, zernh=“eastwest”, tarnh=“westeast”…