3 ms·

“English could win this contest handily if we chose carefully and use the occasional …”?

• wolfgang42 5y ago
  My guess is “amateurish elocutionist” but I needed computer assistance: $ for t in matrs lctinis; do echo; grep '.*'$(echo $t | sed 's/./&.*/g') /usr/share/dict/words | grep -Ev "s$"; done Amaterasu amateurish amateurism humanitarianism masterstroke materialism materialist materialistic materialistically maturest metatarsal miniaturist misanthropist elocutionist For my own amusement, I also came up with another grammatically plausible “parsimonious” (inserting the fewest extra letters) interpretation: > Galosh-clad win this contest handily if we chase carefully and use the occasional mantras, elocutionist!
  • sarabande 5y ago
    This is great! As someone who immediately recognized it as 'mater lectionis' I wondered how someone unfamiliar with this aspect of Hebrew would attempt to solve the puzzle.
• deleted 5y ago
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• tomsmeding 5y ago
  Probably "matres lectionis": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mater_lectionis (probably should have been "mater lectionis" (mtr lctinis?) given the rest of the sentencr ;) ) I didn't know this term existed, but the letters felt like Latin to me. Presumably the point is to use some well-chosen vowels where they are necessary for disambiguation.
  • samatman 5y ago
    Just so, and this is the reason the trick works so well in Hebrew: aleph, vav, yod, and ayin, serve as vowels in most contexts where such are needed.
• deleted 5y ago
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