An annotated dictionary for the language decipherment game, Ginger, by Kevin Du

Ginger is a language adventure game where every word is pronounceable, even without understanding its meaning. Step into a labyrinth of interconnected meanings and immerse yourself in a one-person subculture.

Ginger is a game about deciphering "a novella within a dictionary", written in an unknown language.

If this interests you even a little, please support its author by buying it on itch.io or Steam.

• Ginger on itch.io
• Ginger on Steam

---

This repository contains some of my outputs from Gingering:

101-ginger-base-dictionary.csv

The untranslated dictionary in spreadsheet form, extracted from the "Paper Edition v13" .pdf of Ginger that the author makes freely available on Steam.

My base dictionary includes extra information such as:

• Corpus frequencies
  • Number of times used in definitions
  • Number of times the word is reduplicated (e.g. yra yra)
• Grammar information
  • The actual colours of words when they are pronounced (yes, I pronounced all 1,182 of them)
  • Parts of speech (POS) tags
  • Number of POS tags the word falls into
    • For words that fall into many parts of speech (e.g. deqhm has a k. and sj. subdefinition), I also split the larger definition into separate columns for each part.
• Word meta-information
  • Word length
  • Number of "senses" (numbered subdefinitions) the word has. For example, ji has 2 senses in its definition: "k. 1 beba. 2 qrexzt deqhm.".
  • Graphemes
    • The word split into its graphemes
    • Number of graphemes
    • Initial and final graphemes
  • Reversed words and graphemes (for sorting by suffix)

Translation history

These are digested versions of my personal Gingering logbook, where I write down what I think a word means and where I got that idea from.

102-Translation-history-colours.csv

Reverse chronological log of what I think the colours of pronounced words mean.

103-Translation-history-parts.csv

Reverse chronological log of what I think the parts of speech tags (sj., k., etc.) mean.

104-Translation-history-words.csv

Reverse chronological log of what I think each word means.

105-ginger-translated-dictionary.csv

Spoilers! The translation histories above, applied to the base dictionary.

Note that the translations are not at all known to be correct. All of this is just educated guessing.