Advent Calendar : Day 9

[Kathis]

Day 9 of our puzzle adventure, and we still have some lessons before we get to the really tricky ones. 

 

Today we'll have to go back to letters, and a bit away from math.. (we'll come back to math soon..ish). 

The lesson will be Cryptograms

 

This is where a symbol or character is used to replace an existing letter in the entire cypher. So unlike our second day's lesson with Caesar where you could just shift the letters and replace all the letters in relation to each other, or vigenere where we have a key and it's essentially a more elaborate Caesar cipher. Cryptograms only cares about the 1 letter, and it can shift to whatever it want, however they cannot be an already existing symbol. So A could be Z, and B could be T,  the word YOU could be UZM  and it would mean that all U's in the puzzle would be Y,  all Z's in the puzzle would be O, and all M's in the puzzle would be U. Makes sense? No, too bad. Go look it up on Wikipedia if you are still confused at this point. This section is just to help you understand what's to come. (Yes I am still a bit bitter, Grinching here.)

 

So that all said and done, I cannot just provide you with a plain old cryptogram, why? because there are solvers online. Like really good solvers, where they don't require keys or clues. So unfortunately we have to go a bit extra.

 

...Here is a shortcut for those who can read this. It will at least give you the phrase, you still need to figure out the code.

^- This is my what I had to learn to read, working on this game. 

 

Now for the rest of the world.

er, th, sh, ch, ing, re, and  double letters  will share 1 symbol. 

I have provided you a keyword in the red box. 

The Phrase is another Christmas phrase. this one is by  Larry Wilde from The Merry Book of Christmas. Though I might have added a few to the number, but it was to give you a few more letters.

 

 

 

The blue is the code. Now consider today an additional lesson. Since the code needs to be followed by a number. That number is in Base 35, I am not cruel that I won't provide you the counting system.

 

 

the black dots represent the grouping for quick counting, the blue are singles that you could in theory add up to the black to get the number faster.  The system starts at 0, but I did not show it. 

 

Good luck everyone. And to the ones that dislike my puzzles. Tu fais toi. 

[Nylea]

Not sure if this was intended or not, but there appears to be a typo(missing box?) in this section - based on input from other players. This completely crippled my ability to solve this puzzle as intended.

[Kathis]

Solution: TEEEMATHRE33

How to get:

 

There were several ways of getting this, the first was to do the cryptogram itself. 

Start with the red box as your given, find those symbols and plug them into the puzzle where they matched up.

Second step would be to look for symbols that seemed to duplicate themselves super often. 

 

We could see that we had several words that repeated,  which made this a bit easier. 

focus on the smaller words. With the additional information about how "er, th, sh, ch, ing, re, and  double letters  will share 1 symbol. "

you might find yourself treating the 2 symbol words as 3 letters or 2 letters. 

Many of you could approached this at your own direction of attack. 
 

In English  the top 5 common letters are E T A O I.  You were given E, O from Jellyro. 

The next thing to consider with cryptograms is the most common word. The, Be, To, of, and  are the top 5. 

 

That would mean that our Ө┘ could have been BE or THE  since th was considered as one of the combinations that could share a single character. Lets say Ө was B, Ө┘♥, Ө┌╛, Ө□┌♥  would look like  B E Y  / B R _ / B _ RY respectively.   While Bey would be "A governor of a district in Turkish dominions" or "in various other places, a prince or noblemen" it is very unlikely this phrase would be relevant to those and what would that leave for BR _ ? that it would it would follow a hyphen to combine to another word? Not to mention what would B _ RY be? berry? which does bring up the interesting question which rule would come first? the er or the rr?  Obviously at this point I am trying to figure out what sort approaches you had. In short, Ө brought it's own confusion. What of TH? Ө┘♥, Ө┌╛, Ө□┌♥  would look like  TH E Y  / TH R _ / TH _ RY respectively.   This looks more manageable. They is very much a word that doesn't require weird meaning or looking up. Th_ry-Thr_  looks like a number and we know there is a number because I said. "Though I might have added a few to the number, but it was to give you a few more letters."

 

So we would fill that in, and look for more easier words that can be attacked. if you went after the th_ry-thr_  and figured out it was thirty-three, you could then fill in those symbols, and make your way through the works.  Y _ _ R was also given, O _  not many words start with O, with 2 or 3 letters, Depending on how you approached the cryptogram you would have a different level of difficulty. I honestly was hoping for more cooperation in here, but it is what it is.

 

 

 

Eventually you would have gotten TEEEMATHRE33

 

---

The second method was to look up the quote from Larry Wilde from The Merry Book of Christmas. That was given, I didn't expect anyone to however. 

 

it is pretty famous and could be found in a lot of places. 

You could plug in the phrase into the puzzle, and then use the information you gathered to fill in the code word. 

 

---

 

The way was to understand Konglish  (Korean-English)

 

네버 워리 어바웃 더 사이즈 오브 유어 크리스마스 트리. 인 더 아이즈 오브 칠드런, 데이 아 써리-쓰리 핏 톨.

 

 

It's a matter of sounding it out, and it would sound roughly like "Never worry-o about de size-ue obue yueo christmas-a tree. In de ai-ues obue childen, dey a thirty-three peet tall" which is My good friends parents trying to speak English in a heavy accent.

 

Same as the first phrase, you would translate the Konglish into English, and fill in the puzzle. 

----

Konglish is one of those weird langauges, where if you are an english speaking person you actually have an advantage. But it is used in games so much. 힐링 for example in Konglish  is Healing. Most games that are made in Korea tend to use Konglish for their games. Another common one is 아이템  which is item. But if it were to be true Korean it would be 목.  

 

For the record, I am Canadian for those not aware. I had to pick up several languages growing up in no order, Korean, French, English, Polish, Japanese, tiny bit of Mandarin, Spanish (the Mexican kind), Filipino, Russian, and about 3 different Indigenous languages such as Dakelh, Shuswap, Hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ (Had to look up the spelling of that last one...) .  I know enough on how to be polite, but not enough to hold a meaningful conversation. During my time working on JellyRO, I had to pick up Mayan, Dutch, and German. So sorry if my brain doesn't do English well enough for a lot of you.