Wednesday, January 21, 2004

UPDATE ON THE MIT ARAMAIC (?) PUZZLE. My correspondent e-mails:

Thanks for your help with the Mystery Hunt this weekend. Here's how it turned out that the Aramaic/Hebrew puzzle worked: each line of Aramaic letters, transliterated into the Hebrew alphabet, gave a snippet from the first line of a psalm. Well, not quite: a snippet from a psalm, with a single mistake introduced. Take the letters that were supposed to be in place of the mistakes, and transliterate into the English alphabet, to get ntrlnngs. So the answer to the puzzle was the only English word consistint of those consonants: interlinings. (The answer to each Mystery Hunt puzzle is usually a word or phrase.)


I'm still not sure what "Aramaic letters, transliterated into the Hebrew alphabet" means. Aramaic and Hebrew are written in the same alphabet. I think the inventor may have meant paleo-Hebrew letters rather than Aramaic letters.

Anyhow, what an admirably diabolical puzzle!

UPDATE (22 January): By the way, my correspondent's team won, with five minutes to spare.

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