easy.

Done

where are all the bloody threes? i hate it when there's a missing number.

i suppose i'll figure it out

annoys me

oh... there. i made threes. they just needed to be wooed a bit.

a lesson in patience. maybe that's what sudoku means in Japanese. probably not. it could mean 'patience' but that would be unlikely.

Sudoku is the Japanese abbreviation for a phrase meaning "the digits must occur only once".

oh. well. that says it. thank you for expanding my understanding. now, for the other two-thirds of the grid.

Well, they key to understanding is that it's an abbreviation in another language.

hm hm hm, je vois la vie en rooooseee....

yes, it's very efficient, that. hebrew uses tons of such abbreviations.

post!

well, i never! i was saying, for example, the word 'tanakh' is short for torah, nevi'im and kethuvim.

A lot of languages have adopted some sort of secret rule to slur the words into a run-on word of sorts. The japanese language is no exception.

we don't seem to do that so much in english; we have some acronyms but not lots. the military seems to do that well, but that's not really english, not really

No, but we're getting there. The type of messages sent on myspace and mobile phones consists mostly of acrynoms and abbreviations. As fluency increases, the speed of speech often/usually increases. And with the advent/rise of convenience, somehow languages will learn to shorthand everything for the sake of convenience.

i was thinking of that too... the language stripped down to mere bones and feathers. inevitable.

There's a rule that linguists know called Zipf's law--whenever something becomes culturally important, a short word will evolve for it. So, television becomes TV, automobile becomes car, and so on...

what an interesting thought. i imagine zipf has an interesting etymology.

love noam chomsky, although less for his linguistic theory

Yes, I admit that I stopped paying any attention to Chomsky's syntactic theories somewhere around his "government and binding" theory...

he's boffo

to mab: did you also know that the letter in the Hebrew alphabet also stand for numbers?

hello

Whew! much better than when I tried it bleary-eyed at 1AM

hey how are u all doing

good thanks

is anyone on here

sool someone is on here

thats supposted to be cool

lots of people are, they're just sudokuing.

oh well i like to talk to people

hmm, well, hello :)

evening bluecat

hello bluecat

go

done

Difficulty score = 24. The little green numbers are my friends today.

I hear you drwho

mistake was made

that was easy

hi

hi