Given the ongoing success of LingDoku and Masyu Ortograpiu, the SpecGram Puzzle Team has decided to continue to branch out into new Linguistically-Themed Pseudo-Nihonese Puzzle forms. The most recent addition is HitoriGuistiku, a linguistics-heavy variant of the well-known Japanese logic puzzle Hitori.

Rules

The HitoriGuistiku

Hoverkraf saya penuh belut — Indonesian

puzzle is presented on a grid (below, at bottom), with each cell containing a character. The goal is to “paint” appropriate cells black so that no row or column contains more than one character with a given phonetic feature. For this IPA-based HitoriGuistiku, the relevant features are place and manner of articulation, as with some previous LingDoku puzzles.

From top to bottom, left to right: Devanagari, Latin, Chinese, Mayan, Thai, Greek, Armenian, Ogham, Malayalam, Canadian Syllabics, Mongolian, Irish, Egyptian Hieroglyph, Gothic, Runic, Hirigana, Linear B Ideogram, Katakana, Hittite Pictograph, Cyrillic, Cherokee.

Further constraining the puzzle, the black, or “painted out,” cells of the grid cannot be vertically or horizontally adjacent. The remaining cells (white) must all be connected horizontally or vertically in a single group. Traditional Hitori-solving techniques apply.

From last time: at right is the solution to the Masyu Ortograpiu puzzle. No correct solutions were submitted, and no winners were selected to receive SpecGram magnets as prizes. Alas.

If you believe you are worthy of the formidable task that is HitoriGuistiku, email your solution to SpecGram. At least one random winner chosen from among those who send in correctly completed puzzles by April 15th, 2007 will be awarded a SpecGram magnet.

A solution (likely the correct one, but life is fickle) and the name of the prize winners (if any) will appear in the upcoming May issue.

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