"Let Stalk Strine" by benchen71

[benchen71]

grid done...wrote down a few things but not seeing a path across the moat. might have to table this for a while.....

what Ergcat said. Intrigued but stuck.

I'm happy to offer a nudge. Just PM me with what you have so far!

[benchen71]

Another 24 hours and another 6 solvers have appeared, bringing us to 17:

woozy
Berto
ChrisKochmanski
CPJohnson
Cindy Heisler
Pair O Ducks

Nudges will appear imminently...

[benchen71]

Nudges, in order of increasing blatancy:

1. There are two hints: the puzzle title (if you can decode it!) and the clue to 70 across: "Someone who talks Strine, which is what you're going to have to do to solve the meta"

2. You may have noticed that some grid entries were harder to fill in than the rest. These grid entries have been written in Strine (which is Australian for "Australian English").

3. Work out what these entries would have been had they not been phoneticised into Strine.

4. But how do you get a 5-letter word from the first letters of these 7 entries? Placing a hyphen between letters 2 and 3 and between letters 5 and 6 may help. Then try saying it out loud. Hey, listen to that: you're speaking Strine!

[HeadinHome]

Got it this morning with an overnight nudge from Ben. Moat crossed with floaties.

[hoover]

Quoting and clarifying benchen71's most blatant nudge, so don't click any of these if you don't want to be spoiled.

Nudges, in order of increasing blatancy:

4. But how do you get a 5-letter word from the first letters of these 7 entries? Placing a hyphen between letters 2 and 3 and between letters 5 and 6 may help. Then try saying it out loud. Hey, listen to that: you're speaking Strine!

7? I found only 6, or 8 if you count both halves of the two-entry entries, so I must be missing something. I still got there, though, so it must be a minor oversight.

[MikeyG]

I have some trepidation to start this one with how tough it seems to be playing, but I'll go for it!

Edit #1: What I presumed would be the mechanism is not it, haha.

Edit #2: Apparently, with the nudges, that's pretty much it, but I need to brush up on my strine!

[edestlin]

My silly mistake held me back from what was already a tough meta, but I learned a bunch and enjoyed the heck out of this one. Thanks, Ben!

[MatthewL]

Well, I'm across the moat, but only because Ben personally guided me across. Fortunately, my degree is not in linguistics, so no shame there.

[Ergcat]

Crossed the moat with nudge #4 and a small speech lesson from @benchen71 !! Fun meta!

[woozy]

Quoting and clarifying benchen71's most blatant nudge, so don't click any of these if you don't want to be spoiled.

Nudges, in order of increasing blatancy:

4. But how do you get a 5-letter word from the first letters of these 7 entries? Placing a hyphen between letters 2 and 3 and between letters 5 and 6 may help. Then try saying it out loud. Hey, listen to that: you're speaking Strine!

7? I found only 6, or 8 if you count both halves of the two-entry entries, so I must be missing something. I still got there, though, so it must be a minor oversight.

It's hard to find the 7th as it seems like normal slang to us that we actually are familiar with. And it's a little obvious that it is referring to the meta. But it is speaking strine when you think of it

[benchen71]

Since the nudges, the following solvers have made it to the answer:

HeadinHome
Jaclyn
Casey Callaghan
MrTheHan
edestlin
MatthewL
Bird Lives
Ergcat
DrTom

That brings us to 26. There will be one more solver update, immediately before the answer reveal Monday morning Australia time.

[lbray53]

I submitted an answer that was accepted on Crosshare after additional prompts from Ben. Good on yous that got it. I am not a bludger. Maybe a dill. Just not easy for me.

[ReB]

Finally hallucinated my way across the MOAT after 5 days of futility.

[benchen71]

Final solver update bringing us up to 28:

lbray53
ReB

[benchen71]

Here's the solution to "Let Stalk Strine":

... which is what I have been for quite a number of you this week!

My original intention was for you, the successful solver, to realise that what I had been doing in this meta was "tutoring" you how to pronounce words like a fair dinkum Aussie! But then, quite early on, I made my offer of private nudges - rather than just running the official nudges earlier than normal. So I ended up doing quite a lot of "tutoring" by PM, too. Hopefully, you appreciated the way things all came together in the end.

While the seed for this puzzle was the mispronunciation of the word "emu", I did have a secondary motive in constructing this puzzle. Occasionally, metas published in the WSJ or MGWCC involve pronouncing words or sounding out a word with letters, and so on. In cases like these it is usually necessary to use US-pronunciation. Now that is absolutely to be expected since these puzzles are constructed by US people, and the audience for these puzzles is predominantly US-based. But for those of us outside of the US, those puzzles can sometimes be harder than they were intended to be. So when I put this puzzle together I was conscious of the fact that it might be more challenging for anyone not familiar with the Australian accent. If you found it hard, just spare a thought for those of us outside of the US when the next US-accent-specific puzzle comes out!

[MikeyG]

I didn't get the puzzle whose answer is my job.

Great puzzle and message, Ben!

[Alvibu67]

Great puzzle!

I’ve always been fascinated by how to represent any word phonetically so someone from any language background could pronounce it. Many Asian languages with tones, or languages with throat sounds or clicks, would be very tricky to represent, but it should be possible.

English has so many pronunciation exceptions, it’s even more difficult.

Like GHOTI is pronounced “fish”: GH as in tough, O as in women, and TI as in nation.

Crazy language!

Allison