Thursday, September 14, 2006

Solutions

Good Morning!
Quizz round three is over! Cool, eh?
So, what was all that about?
First, the question was to decipher. Then, to find the link between the hints, and then, to find the correct answer.

Ok, the patterns used for the question were:
According to some study, it doesn't matter where you put the letters of a word in spelling a word, so I messed up the position of the letters. Example: 'Easy' would have become 'Syea'.
I looked at the result and decided it was too easy. So I used a second pattern: I substituted some letters with numbers and or signs. 'Easy' would have become 'Sy3@'.

But it was still too easy, so I played a bit with duplicating randomly letters, and writing some in uppercase and others in lowercase. So finally 'Easy' might have read something like '5Y3@'.
This was enough pseudo-coding for the question.
Here's the complete translation of my question: (in good english, I made some spelling mistakes as well:-)...on purpose, of course)

Actually, this time I decided to crypt the question.
So, the question asks for a language in way of exxxtinction (read extinction):-):
HINT: Also the name of people, also menaced by extinction.
Easy hints: The first is so distinctive, it's so exclusive, you can't miss it!
Once you got that, it's easy to get the 2nd...think desert.

Still with me? Fine. So lets resume the stuff:
-Language in way of extinction
-Language name = People's name in way of extinction
-Something with a desert. And lot's of funny exclamation marks.
-Something very exclusive.

Ok...to make a long story short: the desert and the exclamation marks were probably the best hints. A short search on google along with a bit of....creative thinking...should have gotten you to a point, where you know that there are a lot of endangered languages and people on this world,
but the right solution(s) are:
The people of the !Kung, !Khoi, !khoikhoi!, San and !Khoisan. And their language...which has basically the same name.
Those people have in common that they were all refered to as 'bushmen' , live in and next to the Kalahari, and that their languages (which differ from !kung, which uses a grammar similar to Bantu, to !Khoisan, which uses an aglutinating grammar) have in common that they include
'Click-sounds'. Those Click-sounds are described in phonetics with the help of exclamation marks, points, and --.
So here are the 'rewards' for the participants:
-Jade +3 for participating
-Stephan +7 for the right solution after the additional hint
-Sami +3 for 'nearly' the right solution before the additional hint, and
-Sami +7 for the right solution after the additional hint and beeing the first to correctly decipher the question. Sami also was not saying that it was too hard, that pays:-)
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I have to go to work now...But this post isn't finished yet. there are some links to come, the red/green scheme for better understanding and much of my knowledge about the San (which was used in a pejorative way, but lacking better descriptions...well..check back tomorrow morning, when the 'News' should be up.
cya:-)

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