Found freewheeling second-to-last changeover (*9, 4-5)

[rhu]

At last night's meeting to discuss Phase II of our synagogue's renovation, the rabbi was discussing with admiration the bet medrash (study hall) of a synagogue in the next town over from Newton:

"The Young Israel of FIRST has a beautiful SECOND bet medrash."

---

Let me unpack that title for you non-NPL-types out there.

This is a "flat," a puzzle in which you have two words or phrases, which are represented in the text by placeholder words such as FIRST and SECOND, and whose actual lengths and punctuation are given by the numbers at the end of the title -- in this case, FIRST has 9 letters and is a capitalized word; SECOND is a hyphenated word with four letters before the hyphen and five after. This pair of words/phrases is called the "base" of the flat.

• A "changeover" is a flat where you can turn the FIRST into the SECOND by taking one letter out of the FIRST and inserting a different letter into the remaining string to get the SECOND. (For example, "brain" could become "bring" by changing over the "a" to the "g".)

• A "second-to-last changeover" specifies that it's the second letter of FIRST that gets removed, and that the changed letter becomes the last letter of SECOND. (So our "brain" to "bring" would be a third-to-last changeover.)

• This one is "freewheeling" because the 4-5 hyphenated word is not itself in the Merriam-Webster dictionaries, but its component pieces are.

• And it's "found" because I didn't make up the base out of my own mind, instead I "found" it by noticing it in something someone else said.

That sounds a lot more complicated than it is. The nice thing about tagging is that once you get used to it, it packs a lot of information into very little space.

Comments

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

So, are you screening comments? Should we just shout out answers? I don't think LJ offers me an option to read the text behind a cut without also displaying comments.

As a non-NPL type, I found your explanation straightforward and easy to understand. I wouldn't have guessed that a changeover would be a category of puzzle, so you weren't over-explaining an obvious idea.

I did, however, need to look up bet medrash before I could solve it. Wikipedia spells it beth midrash, which got me wondering about transliteration from Hebrew to English and if there are multiple standards à la Wade-Giles vs. pinyin, or what.

[abbasegal.livejournal.com]

Also as a non-NPLer, I found your explanation helpful -- without it I would have had no idea how to approach it.

Is [rot13] Oebbxyvar obbx-yvarq what you had in mind? It certainly fits the pattern.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

If you know the answer, no need to post it.

My gloss on "bet medrash" in the first paragraph wasn't sufficient, though? :-(

And there are definitely multiple standards of transliteration.

Just to pick on one detail, for example, the final letter of the aleph-bet is pronounced "s" by Ashkenazic Jews, "t" by Sephardic Jews (and in the standard Israeli pronunciation, which younger Ashkenazic Jews like myself use). In the past, it may have been pronounced "th", but it certainly isn't pronounced that way today --- yet many transliteration systems use "th" to represent that sound.

That's partly how "Shabbat" became "Sabbath", and (to pick a more apt example) "Shee-BOE-let" became "Shibboleth".

So in the word that I transliterated "bet" and Wikipedia spells "beth", it does not sound like the female name Beth at all. And the "e" is bright, so it doesn't sound like the word for "wager". It's halfway between "wager" and "what you fish with." (If I knew IPA this would be a lot simpler.)

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Lrf.

[acroarcs.livejournal.com]

Even as Krewe, I found the explanation helpful because I always forget what "freewheeling" really means besides, well, "freewheeling." I don't do a lot of flats most of the time - something I always mean to work on and never do - but changeovers are a type I remember easily.

I worked from FIRST to SECOND on this, although I of course picked the wrong *9 to work with first, even though it makes no sense to do so. The definition of bet medrash provided was very helpful for confirmation.

[abbasegal.livejournal.com]

There is a movement to try to bring back biblical pronunciation, at least for prayer and study (it wouldn't do much good on the Israeli street). That would include the "th" sound, a voiced "dh" for daleth with no dagesh, distinction between qoof and kaf, rolled resh, voiced palatal fricative for gimel with dagesh, real pharyngal chets and ayins, etc.

I didn't say it was a very big movement... ;-) But it would be more like biblical Hebrew. (Granted, the Shibboleth story shows how language change was already taking place during the times of the Judges, so it is not 100% clear which stratum of Biblical Hebrew this movement's accent would be closest to, or e.g. if Avraham and Moshe would have been spoken with the same letter/sound mapping ).

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Can you believe that "freewheeling" still isn't formally defined in the Guide?

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

It would have been sufficient, except I'm an idiot. To tunnel vision, I plead 2:30AM.

That's a very apt example. It's the aptest.

I find this helpful for IPA, which I ought to know given how often I actually use it.

And now I know I've been mispronouncing bet since I was five. (Both of the synagogues that most of my childhood Jewish friends went to have it in their name: Temple Beth Am and Temple Beth Sholom.)

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the explanation. I had to look at a map, but I got it.

[fauxklore]

It strikes me that how easy or hard this was depends somewhat on local knowledge. The FIRST was, in fact, the first thing I thought of to try, so it pretty much jumped out at me.