Lighan ses Lion
From IFWiki
Lighan ses Lion was Andrew Plotkin's entry in the Spring 2001 WalkthroughComp.
The premise of that event was to produce a (simulated or real) transcript of a work of parser interactive fiction which could be completed with the prescribed set of commands. This entry consists of a transcript; there is no real game behind it.
The transcript is in a fictional non-English language, some of whose words (including those in the prescribed commands) happen to be spelled like English words, but have unrelated meanings. (For this it received a Special Award for Causing Emily Short the Most Grief.)
Links
- Andrew Plotkin's page -- full transcript, with some corrections compared to the original.
- Download or view contents of walkthrough.zip, at the IF Archive -- contains the original (uncorrected) transcript (LIGHAN-S.TXT).
Reviews
- Review (archive) by Emily Short (with links to some translation efforts).
- Review (brief) by Sean Barrett.
Spoilers
There have been several attempts to translate Lighan into English, as much as possible.
- Translation and lexicon (archive) by Emily Short, the competition organiser (2001).
- Translation (archive) by Matt Fendahleen (2001). (References a separate effort by Admiral Jota, not recorded.)
- Translation and lexicon (archive) by David Welbourn (2001). (See also his post on rec.games.int-fiction of 26-May-2001.)
- ifMUD, 2001 (referenced in a 23-May-2001 post on rec.arts.int-fiction by Adam Biltcliffe).
- Tentative lexicon (dead link 🔍) by David Given (2001). (Referenced in this 24-May-2001 post on rec.arts.int-fiction.)
- Late 2025, by the IntFiction forum:
- Let's Translate: Lighan ses Lion by Andrew Plotkin (thread started 20-Nov-2025 by Adam Biltcliffe, with many contributors).
- Adam Biltcliffe's summary of the group's translation efforts (change log).
See also
- The Gostak (Carl Muckenhoupt; 2001; Inform 6; Z-code; Gostakian English) (released slightly later), which is also composed of unfamiliar words. (The author said (19-Nov-2001) that Lighan provided the impetus to complete The Gostak, although it had been in gestation long before.)