[Puzzle Contest] PUZZLE! TIME Solutions!

It’s over!

Congrats to IndigoSkies, who submitted a correct solution on 2008-05-28 at 17:18 and was the only person to have submitted a solution before the deadline. IndigoSkies is the winner of a 20USD gift certificate to YesAsia.com.

Here is a complete solution.

Mini Moni meets Weezer

If you haven’t seen it yet, you should check out Weezer‘s music video for “Pork and Beans”, which appeared today:

[Puzzle Contest] PUZZLE! TIME

I had a dream last night where my friend and I were visiting Hello! Project Land, which was like the H!P counterpart to Disneyland. And we were walking through the Kirarin☆Land section of the park (where “Chance!” was playing on the loudspeakers) and I wondered if that was what they named the album after…

Unfortunately, I can’t remember anything else…. >.<

But anyway …

★★★IT’S PUZZLE! TIME AGAIN★★★

Indeed.

If you were put off by the excessive verbiage of my last puzzle, here’s a treat for you (perhaps): this one’s a wordless puzzle, so much so that I’ve obscured all the text in the puzzle. And this time there’s no nitpicking about what is or isn’t the correct way to spell or format something. Spell stuff however you want to. There isn’t even a grid to fill in.

 

Rules

1. Submit your solution as a comment. I will approve each comment, so your submissions will not be seen by anyone else. (You may also submit normal comments, but I may edit them if I feel you’re giving away anything.)
2. Only the final answer is needed. You do not need to submit information found during intermediate stages of the puzzle.
3. The final answer should be included in the text of your submission. There is no single correct spelling/formatting of the answer; anything reasonably close enough will be judged correct.
4. You may submit any number of possible solutions, though please keep your guesses to a minimum.
5. You may submit partial solutions, but you should be aware that you will not benefit from this in any way, as you will neither increase your chances of winning a prize nor receive any feedback.
6. I will also not confirm correct solutions, but if you got the right answer, it should be somewhat obvious that it’s right.
7. This contest ends on 2008 May 29 at 23:59:59 UTC.
8. After the contest is over, I will post a list of the names of everyone submitting a correct solution before the deadline. If you wish to have your name listed, please explicitly include your name, with your preferred formatting, in the body of your submission or in the name field of your comment. Otherwise, I will assume you wish to be anonymous. If you include your name and state that you wish to remain anonymous, you will remain anonymous.
9. The first person to submit a correct solution wins a 20 USD YesAsia.com gift certificate. If no one submits a correct solution by the deadline, no one wins.
10. Unlike the last contest, you may feel free to consult others for help or collaborate on this puzzle. However, there will still be only a single prize. So use your own judgment as to how much information you are willing to share, and how you want to divvy up the prize. If you are collaborating and are submitting an answer, the person who submits it will get the prize (if it’s correct and ahead of other correct submissions). If you wish to have the names of your collaborators listed on the Wall of Awesome, you may include their names in your submission.
11. I may post hints later. Some hints have been added to the new Hints section below.

 

The Exhortative-Participle Construction in Hello! Project English (Part 1)

Part 1

It appears I’m being devoured by a number of final projects/assignments (four!), all of them related to linguistics, so I decided to take some time aside to post some H!P-related linguisticizing of my own.⁰

This is a brief examination of the exhortative-participle construction in Japanese English (English as spoken in Japan; cf. American English or Australian English), or perhaps it is peculiar only to Hello! Project English: that is, the construction which places an exhortative particle (let’s) next to a verb in its present-participle form (as in let’s dancing) as opposed to a verb in its infinitive form (let’s dance), which is typical of most varieties of English. If we suppose that this is a genuine product of a variety of English that differs from most others in this regard, then this particular construction is deserving of continued study as part of an effort to illuminate the rules that constrain natural human languages and the processes by which languages evolve.¹

This interesting construction appears in this video of Disney-brainwashed² Morning Musume, which was kindly brought to my attention by Celestia at Bikkuri Project: