I gtg now, good luck! I still couldn't believe it's almost done tbh XD

@athin Thx for the clues!

@GarethMcCaughan time to brute force

I've been trying various kinds of brute force, without any success to speak of.

E.g., I found some Indonesian word lists -- top 10000 on Wikipedia and Twitter (they have a couple of other corpora but those are the ones I've used so far) -- and am feeding all the --O and -E- ones into Google Translate in the hope of finding something useful. No luck so far.

Or do you mean we should kidnap athin and beat him up until he tells us the answers? That seems a bit rude.

@GarethMcCaughan I'm not below kidnapping users. Don't you remember?

As long as we give him Wifi, I don't think it's rude

I am systematically placing every single --O combination

Only 676 to try!

eh i have a method

I'm quite tempted just to post what I have as a partial and be done with it for a while.

Go ahead

Actually

I'll ping you if I get anything

OK, partial answer posted: puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/94326/…

aha!!!!

I got the def for 15a

PEL which means mop, aka "cleaning cloth"

hmm

But there's no P_O word besides PHO

and that's a "relationship destructor?"

wait nvm

Yo, I can barely solve cryptic clues in English, how the heck did you two manage to do this?

Gareth did all the work

I just kinda piggy-backed

@GarethMcCaughan you must have a lot of time on your hands, huh? :)

@GarethMcCaughan Ping me if when you solve

Aha, finally got 18a, and @North was right: it's PEL meaning a mop, which must be "kain pembersih". And TOMPEL are black marks or scars, especially on the face. Not a word known to Google Translate but it's in the Indonesian Wiktionary.

pretty sure 18d is going to be PRO. Still working out details.

Votes are PRO (for) and KONTRA (against) and the GT translation of the id.wiktionary.org page for PRO specifically uses the word "agree".

Aha, and a PROTES is a protest and as already noted a TES is a test or exam. We're done.

@North Done!

@GarethMcCaughan !!!!!

Nice!

High five! O/\O

congrats guys! a really impressive work!

there wasn't any P-O words on google translate that I saw, so I figured it was wrong :/

Ofc I should've checked wikitionary

I presume because pro in indonesian also means pro in english?

does pro in english mean agree btw? (I thought so)

Haha, no

ah i see!

Pro is short for "professional"

Like a "pro golfer" or "pro puzzler"

pro has double meaning in indonesian, and one of them is professional that is XD

Ah

Good to know

another one is to agree, like pro vs con

Ohhhh

I always thought pro in pro vs con meant like good vs bad

ah i see haha

Yeah

Pro: "an advantage of something or an argument in favor of a course of action."

This was really fun to do

yeap

You should make more of these!

ah thanks for the compliment! ><

lol i dunno if i should make another one lol

hehe

maybe we can have cc in another language like korean :p

Oh gosh

My Korean is lowkey kinda rusty

(oh my bad, i misthought you're from korea)

I was born in Korea, but I moved to U.S. when I was seven

woa :o

Nah Korean was my first language it's just I don't speak it as much anymore so I forgot :P

haha i see xD

yeah maybe you could try to make one :p

I could

I'm not sure how it would exactly work though

and start this kind of frenzy lol

CCs in another Language?

CC as a Second Language

lol

That has a ring to it

I eventually want to do one in Latin, that should be very fun

But I'm afraid that might make things too obvious

oh sounds very interesting

I have a whole book of Latin crosswords, I think.

how do you get that lol (or is that common there)

The Times newspaper does them every week, or maybe every two weeks.

The book I have isn't related to those, though.

(I think. Hang on a moment while I go and check.)

Yeah, my book is entirely unrelated to the Times.

(The clues in that book are almost all in English and mostly straight rather than cryptic.)

and i just learnt that us/uk crossword has to: (1) all answers consist of at least 3 letters, (2) all letters must be clued both vertically and horizontally

Solving a cryptic in a foreign language is really hard work. I don't think we'd want too many of those.

#2 is not true.

@GarethMcCaughan lol this is actually true

ah is that so for #2

There are two styles of cryptic, "blocked" and "barred". (Not sure whether "blocked" is the usual term.) In a blocked one, you have a grid of squares and some of them are shaded. Like @athin's Indonesian one. In a barred one, you have a grid of squares none of which is shaded, but there are barriers between some pairs of adjacent squares and words don't run across the barriers.

Barred cryptics usually have a larger fraction of checked letters (i.e., ones that appear in both across and down answers).

For blocked ones (which are more common), the usual rule is that at least half the letters in each light (i.e., word in the crossword) should be checked.

Usually it's alternate letters.

ah i see

For barred cryptics, I'm not sure that there are specific rules but the main reason for that style is to allow for more cross-checking for harder crosswords.

icic good to know! in indonesian crossword, i guess there is no specific rule: they can even have 2-letters answers; and no rule about checking. at least they just prefer the symmetric board one compared to non-symmetric

So, e.g., the Listener crossword (which used to appear in a magazine called The Listener but now appears in the Times) uses obscure words, difficult cryptic constructions, and weird quirks ("Ten of the across and ten of the down answers must be treated thematically before entry in the grid. Leftovers will provide a clue to the nature of the treatment.").

@GarethMcCaughan i couldn't imagine indonesian crossword will be as hard as that!

The particular quirky rubric there isn't a real one, I just made it up, but it's fairly typical. It might then turn out that those 20 answers each need to have one letter removed according to some scheme or other, and then the 20 leftover letters spell out a description of what you're doing.

welp!

I still can't believe Gareth did it

I don't know how or what sort of mad witchcraft he had to invoke

@athin btw this is the first set of cryptic clue I've solved... like ever

Granted, Gareth provided some of the letters already

wow lol

and tbh, i actually never solved cc before, so i made one before solved one haha ><

so i should be lack of many things, nice to have some feedbacks from here tho!

I'm not exactly sure, but it was super fun :P

I'm probably not the best person for feedback, and the fact that it was in another language maks it a bit harder

haha, yet i still couldnt believe this is actually done ><

it is a bit surreal

oh yeah @athin quick question

was 12 supposed to be an &lit?

oh yeah @athin @GarethMcCaughan i gotta show you a jewel i found later on gt

it's on my other laptop which i currently have access to atm

@athin Not much feedback to offer other than the indirect-anagram thing; I don't consider myself competent to judge the elegance of cryptics in a language I don't know :-).

It was obviously sound enough to be solvable.

My impression is that the clues were pretty easy, which is just as well because if they'd been hard then they'd likely have been impossible for anyone but native speakers.

@North oh 12 is intendedly ddef. "tts ini" means "this crossword" which is actually a special crossword: cryptic crossword. "penuh teka-teki" is basically the definition of cryptic

but uh, i actually haven't known what is &lit, maybe it's also worked that way?

@GarethMcCaughan right, i'm still trying how to make the cc harder apparently.. even for regular indonesian crossword, not much multi-interpretation from a single clue (as in definition here)

but ofc i'll try!

@athin Usually an exclamation point indicates a &lit (where the whole clue can also be the definition)

i.e. "Cast, or characters in play! (6)" meaning ---> ACTORS (ddef &lit.)

Taken from Deus's explanation

Sorry cast or characters in play is actaully an anagram of CAST OR

@GarethMcCaughan I'm gonna write up an explanation for 12a, 15 a, and 10d

Permission to edit directly onto your answer?

Actually you have your own way of writing up explanations

I'll let you write it out

yeah, I guess I should write up explanations of all the wordplay.

or at least all the wordplay I understand, which is not necessarily all the wordplay.

(Done now.)

What a journey that was

@North ah i see, yeah it was just ddef tbf, and I just know the exclamation point is important! (I thought the signs are just irrelevant somehow)