Read and Write - Solution

In this puzzle, we are greeted with a crossword, but each clue has a word transcribed in one of 5 cryptic scripts after it.

Our first step is to identify these scripts, which are all fictional constructed scripts from various media. They are:

• “Atlantean” from Atlantis: The Lost Empire
• “Alienese” from Futurama
• “Gallifreyan” from Doctor Who
• “Halo Covenant Alphabet” from Halo
• "Language of the First Ones” from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

Then we convert the scripted words to English, which gets us:

#	Scripted Word	Script	English Transcription
1		First Ones	BACKSTROKE
2		Atlantean	KILN
3		Gallifreyan	ALKALI
4		Alienese	GO BOARD
5		Halo Covenant	NEEDLE
6		First Ones	SKIN CARE
7		Halo Covenant	CLULEY
8		Gallifreyan	AMARILLO
9		Atlantean	FRONT LINE
10		Alienese	NARRATOR
11		Halo Covenant	IO
12		Halo Covenant	DELGADO
13		Atlantean	ALFONSO IV
14		First Ones	MACHINE
15		Alienese	EQUALLY
16		Alienese	BANQIAO DAM
17		Atlantean	ANSARI
18		First Ones	BROTHERS
19		Gallifreyan	WHAT
20		Gallifreyan	EVENTUALLY

As the flavortext indicates, these are not very good answers—they don’t go with the clues at all! But they do fit in the crossword, so we’ll fit them in there. Once the grid is filled out, reading the highlighted letters gives us the clue “ KLINGON KALEL NOLDOR QOHOR NAVI". These are all fictional people or groups associated with a conlang.

We haven’t used the crossword clues yet, and they don’t seem to have good English solutions that fit in the grid. So we’ll answer them in these conlangs, with each script from before corresponding to one language. We find the correct matching with a little trial and error; many ideas (like “leaf-shaped”) only exist in one of the languages, and other clues (like “...the last of one’s kind”) hint towards certain media. The script-language matching we get is:

Here are the solutions to every clue, and one possible explanation of how to find them:

Once we’re done, we get this grid:

The flavor text instructs us to “sort out each person’s contribution,” so we extract a word for each language by reading left-to-right and top-to-bottom in just the words written in that language. This gives us:

The final cluephrase is "Third person omniscient; or, way of thinking"; the former is a literary POINT OF VIEW and the latter means POINT OF VIEW as well.

Author's Notes

I had a lot of fun writing First Ones and Circular Gallifreyan for this puzzle, since both languages allow for a lot of creative freedom. With First Ones in particular, the lines above the main branch are purely decorative and often pictographic, so I tried to make “backstroke” look like a person swimming backstroke, put a nose in the middle of “skin care,” and shaped “brothers” like a heart. I also was a bit flexible with syllable breaks to make the words look better (the She-Ra writers do the same thing, so I felt justified). There were a few cool writing systems/features we weren’t able to use: when Atlantean is written over multiple lines, it alternates between going left-to-right and right-to-left, so it flows like water. And while all of the writing systems we used are more or less English ciphers, a few iterations of Hylian (from The Legend of Zelda) were ciphers to Japanese Kana instead!

The spoken languages were also really interesting. We tried to use especially unique words from each language, but were constrained due to our extraction method and the fact that these languages have relatively small vocabularies. Here are some interesting words that didn’t make it into the puzzle:

• “ingolmo” is Quenya for “loremaster”
• “ingyenga” is Na’vi for “puzzling, enigmatic”
• "nìFranse” is Na’vi for “French” (Na’vi actually has words for a lot of Earth-specific things, including all of our months and days of the week)
• “jegh” is Klingon for “surrender,” while “Doghjey” is Klingon for “unconditional surrender”
• “sholehkh” is Kryptonese for “(male) cyborg”
• “āsikagon” is High Valyrian for “to give rebirth to”