Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
Path: gmd.de!Germany.EU.net!mcsun!sunic!news.lth.se!pollux.lu.se!magnus
From: magnus@thep.lu.se (Magnus Olsson)
Subject: Re: Non-English adventures (was Re: Adventure design)
Message-ID: <1993Feb16.143037.12175@pollux.lu.se>
Sender: news@pollux.lu.se (Owner of news files)
Nntp-Posting-Host: dirac.thep.lu.se
Organization: Theoretical Physics, Lund University, Sweden
References: <neilg.729555282@sfu.ca> <)> <1lp2faINNeb@life.ai.mit.edu>
Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1993 14:30:37 GMT
Lines: 78

In article <1lp2faINNeb@life.ai.mit.edu> dmb@ai.mit.edu writes:
>In article <neilg.729555282@sfu.ca> Neil K. Guy writes:
>> Actually, I'd say that anyone saying "take red dagger" in English is
>>likely to sound like a half-wit. :) But how is Swedish different in this
>>sense? 
>
>I'm curious about this also.  Oops, I mean
>
>>ask Magnus about Swedish

OK. You ask Magnus about Swedish. Magnus considers the question for
some time, and then replies: 


I've thought about this a little more, and come to the conclusion that
the problem is not so much that the "adventure way of talking" sounds
more stupid in Swedish. One crucial difficulty with the Scandinavian
languages, as opposed to other Germanic ones, is that we put the
definite article as a suffix, not as a separate word. 

This means that altough the method suggested by Neil (I think it was
by him, but the original post has expired), i.e. to use the definite
form of nouns in the vocabulary, but the indefinite when talking about
things, could work. It'd be a kluge, though. One disadvantage would be
if you wanted to translate this:

: There is a knife and a fork here.
> Take the knife and the fork.
: Taken.
> Drop the knife and the fork into the well.
: The knife falls into the well.
: The fork falls into the well.

Here, you have to use both the definite and indefinite forms of nouns
when referring to them. Of course, this can be fixed by having two
fields in the description of an object, one for the indefinite and one
for the definite form.

However, the big problem is when parsing commands like "take the red
dagger". The correct Swedish translation of this is "Ta den r{\"o}da
dolken", where both the adjective and the noun are in the definite
form. "den" is the explicit form of the definite article.

As long as one can accept a purist parser, that only accepts
grammatically correct sentences, there wouldn't be any big difficulty
(that's the way chosen by the authors of Berg). However, imagine how
tedious it would be always to have to type your commands as full
sentences. People would want to shorten their commands; at least I was
constantly annoyed when playing Berg by not being able to do that.

So the parser should really be accomodating, and accept the following
forms of the command:

"Ta den r{\"o}da dolken" ("Take the red dagger").
"Ta r{\"o}da dolken" (still definite form, but only one definite article)
"Ta r{\"o}d dolk" ("Take red dagger") - never mind if it sounds stupid!
"Ta en r{\"o}d dolk" ("Take one red dagger") if there are several.

So the parser really should know a lot more about grammar than in the
equivalent English case.


Another problem is how to represent characters that aren't in ASCII.
The letter I've written as {\"o} above  (which is o-diaresis or
o-umlaut or "o with two dots on top" or whatever you want to call it)
would be represented as '|' on a system that uses the 7-bit Swedish
character set, as some code > 127 on an IBM PC, as another 8-bit code
on a Mac, and as a third 8-bit code on other systems. 

I don't know if TADS is 8-bit transparent, but even if it is there
would be difficulties porting the adventure between different
platforms.

              Magnus Olsson                | \e+      /_
    Department of Theoretical Physics      |  \  Z   / q
        University of Lund, Sweden         |   >----<           
 magnus@thep.lu.se,  thepmo@selund.bitnet  |  /      \===== g
PGP key available via finger or on request | /e-      \q
