I'm actually rather disappointed by the fact that they replied in English: it reminds me too much of a bilingual waiter switching from French to English because they recognize that you are an Anglophone. The file name (and content) makes it clear to me that they wrote the original in French and translated it into English for them.
Now for the actual content:
Nice to meet you, Kankan from Indians
I feel like I'm missing a French cultural reference. Wikipedia and Google both came up blank aside from the dance. I think "Kankan from Indians" is in fact a mistranslation of "Kankan des indiens", which should mean "Kankan of the Indians".
We would like to make a semantic correction: we are noth the Holy Roman Empire but the Gauls .
Noted. Cue the Asterix references!
The typo here "noth" means that this was manually translated, which is handy to know. Also signals that they are putting a lot of effort into their diplomacy. Also note the space before the period, this done in France-French, but not in the Quebec-French that I was writing in. Will do from here on in.
We'd love to eat a vegetarian curry with you
Excellent!
We are delighted to learn that there are men who do not think always to fight. After consultation with the village council we have requirements regarding the signing of the treaty. If you want a treaty of non-aggression you may follow some clauses listed below:
This comes across as rather condescending and almost rude in English, especially the last sentence. This is not the case in French, so let's not offended by this.
not come too close from our borders
inform us about the approximate distance between our civs and your geographic location
inform us about the known existence of others civilizations on our continent
Well, this is the essential part of this message. We're the first team they've met as we already know. They haven't explored much and they know it, which signals to me that they have a weak military, highlighted even more so by the WPC-request - go away please! They know that this is a problem, indicated by their extensive requests for information. I'd suspect that they lost a warrior to a barb, if that fits into our demohacking schemes.
If you share these informations with us, we will be sure that your intentions are really pacific.
Well, here we have it: tell us what you've explored or we won't sign your beloved NAP.
We would like to underline another point: for now we consider that a treaty of 20 rounds is enough. Of course, this treaty would be renewable depending on changing circumstances.
That's... interesting. Clearly, they don't want to burn any bridges as far as early dogpiles go. Since they assume that we are their neighbour, they don't want to get tied into a long NAP with a potential rush target. They want to rush someone. Since we aren't their neighbours, this is really, really, really good news for us.
It goes without saying that if we encounter another civ we will keep you informed.
This was in the same paragraph as the above thing. This probably means they were following the same train of thought when writing that paragraph, even though the points are unrelated. This indicates that meeting someone else is a huge factor in whether or not they want to renew the NAP. I'm sure you all know what that means...
Last point, we advise you to be careful because there are not a lot of forests in the north and you have to protect your warriors from barbarians.
Interesting. This may be where they had their suspected barb loss. Open ground likely means one of two things: tundra/ice, or desert. I'll bring this up in map speculation.
Hoping for future collaborative agreements, we send our greetings
M & Ms great ambassador of the Gauls
Will try and find more on their ambassador. He joined February 2009 and has 1,500 posts.
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I also found a seemingly trivial but interesting tidbit:
This is the avatar of a prominent CivFr member who plays on the UCiv team. Still not too sure what it's supposed to mean.
That's excellent, Bowsling
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