North Carolina Shopping List

This puzzle is based on the Cherokee language. Cherokee is a polysynthetic language, meaning that many morphemes (word parts) can be chained together to create words or phrases expressing long or complicated concepts. Because of this, new words in Cherokee can easily be created using morphemes describing the concept or object in question. The first part of the puzzle consists of 20 descriptions in English of polysynthetic Cherokee words or phrases. For example, the first line is “wisdom storer”. In Cherokee, wisdom is ᎠᎦᏙᎲᏍᏗ and storage is ᎠᏍᏆᏂᎪᏙᏗ, and the word for computer, ᎠᎦᏙᎥᎯᏍᏗ ᎠᏍᏆᏂᎪᏗᏍᎩ, combines morphemes from these two words. Several of these words come from the Cherokee-English Dictionary or the Cherokee Language Consortium Word List, and - as clued by “North Carolina” rather than “Oklahoma” in the flavor text - when there is ambiguity the eastern variant is chosen. Solving yields the following table.

The second part of the puzzle consists of two rows of 10 Arabic numerals each followed by another two rows of 10 Arabic numerals each. This should be parsed as 20 (a, b) pairs, where a is the top number and b is the bottom number. Thus, the given pairs are (8, 6), (15, 5), … Taking the 6th letter of the 8th word, the 5th letter of the 15th word, etc., we get the clue phrase REFER TO SYLLABLE CHART.

This is a reference to the Cherokee syllabary, which has a symbol for every syllable which can appear in the Cherokee language.

The third part of this puzzle is a list of eight rows of Cherokee numerals organized in the same way as the Arabic numerals in the previous part. Applying the same procedure as before to the twenty Cherokee words obtained in the first part of the puzzle, we get eight sequences of Cherokee symbols.

Tracing these sequences of symbols on the Cherokee syllabary, we get the following eight images.

Each of these is a Cherokee syllable, and putting them together we get ᎣᏪᎵᎯᏍᏗᏍᎬ, the Cherokee word for anxiety.