The language in The Edifice (1997)

Playing Game Hints
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Has anybody completely worked out the “foreign” language in Lucian P. Smith’s The Edifice (1997)?

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Ohh I had notes on it a bit ago but I don’t think I saved them! It is mostly totally intelligible. I’ll see if I can dig them up.

Edit: ah, yeah, nowhere to be found :pensive: I could’ve sworn I saw another floating around the internet, but I’ll see if I can whip another up.

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This should help! (spoilers)
edifice language.txt (10.6 KB)

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Here’s my notes. They’re very similar to @pieartsy, except that I hadn’t encountered “unen”.

Edifice, The (Lucian Paul Smith) translations.txt (3.8 KB)

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I have literally never seen anyone’s language notes before. They are delightful! If anyone else happens to have some and wouldn’t mind sharing, that would make me happy.

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grammar
  • -e suffix words seem to be adjectives (takre, akne, lalse, selme, krande)
  • -en suffix words seem to be verbs (gralashen, unen, alanasen, hallen, vicnen)
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Interesting! Thank you, @pieartsy and @Warrigal.

I was reading some things somewhat differently (e.g. “takre” as “dangerous” instead of “scary”). There seems to be a little intentional blurriness to the meaning of some words. It’s a pretty amazing amount of interaction given that the game only recognizes 25 words.

Maybe @lpsmith is willing to comment? Was there a formal design to it or was it something that you made up as you went along? (If willing, I would also love to hear about how you approached the problem on a technical basis.)

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It was absolutely something I made up as I went along. And you are 100% correct that there is intentional blurriness to the definitions–I started off with words I wanted Stranger to be able to respond to, but then had to expand the possible meanings in Stranger’s replies. So a word like “takre” literally started off in the code as meaning ‘dangerous’ (I think it corresponded to an object called ‘dangerous’ in the code), but it then absolutely expanded to also mean ‘scary’ in Stranger’s universe, or even more generally ‘the oppositional forces at work in the world’. Similarly, ‘a’ started off as ‘yes’, but then expanded to be a general positive intensifier, so ‘takre’ might mean ‘scary’, but ‘a takre’ would literally mean ‘yes scary’ but in context would mean ‘extremely scary’.

I actually did write up an article for XYZZYNews where I detailed some of the more technical aspects of the process, as well, it’s "Parlez-vous Nalian?’ in issue 16:

and I’d be more than happy to answer other questions people might have; I’m just happy that people are still enjoying the game, over 25 years after I wrote it!

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Oh, hey, the original link to ‘nalian.inf’ is dead, but it’s still on the if archive:

https://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/compilers/inform6/examples/contributions/nalian.inf

(The structure is there, but all the words are different, for spoiler purposes.)

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I recognized what you describe regarding “a”!! Spanish has the same positive intensifier/emphasis with “sí” (yes). For example, “Sí, yo quiero comprarlo” means “Yes, I want to buy it”. “Sí, yo sí quiero comprarlo” means “Yes, I do want to buy it,” or “Yes, I indeed want to buy it!”

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Wow! Very neat. Thank you @lpsmith for pre-emptively answering all of my questions! I look forward to examining nalian.inf in detail.

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Here’s what I had for the language puzzle. Not quite as complete or as accurate as pieartsy and Warrigal’s notes, but good enough to solve the puzzle.

edifice-nalian.txt (3.0 KB)

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Nice! Thank you for sharing.