As I’ve lamented before, I’m afraid this whole exercise hasn’t worked out as well as I had hoped. I’m sorry for that.
When I devised it I thought it was such a clever little thing but I also realized that not many folks would have the requisite knowledge to figure it out.
Still, I hoped that someone on the SDMB would get it because… well, folks around here figure out the most bizarre stuff all the time. But really it was unfair because you would need knowledge of the particular language to get it. There are people here who speak/write this particular language though.
Well then, Google Translate shows me thathoe, wie, wij, waarom are the Dutch translations of how, who, we, why; and have the indicated English words as pronunciations. Very cute series of words! You’re almost forgiven for asking Dopers to solve a puzzle with an unknown hurdle.
[SPOILER]Yeah. I knew I had a nice little trail of words… with the English word = its Dutch translation and then taking the English pronunciation of that Durch word to start the next line. I just couldn’t figure out the best way to present the puzzle, dammit!
So you are correct. The answer to the puzzle, what fills in the blank is “waarom”.
Or,
How is hoe (hoo)
Who is wie (wee)
We is wij (wy)
Why is waarom (wahr-ohm)[/SPOILER]
That unknown hurdle was supposed to be the tricky part to stretch your brain. I guess it was a bit to tricky.
Maybe the legacy of this effort can be for other Dopers to create similar puzzles with the same pattern??? It’s not that easy to do, I think. I just stumbled upon a good string of words because I know the foreign language.
Here’s a similar chain in Thai:
ear –> who
who –> cry
cry –> wrong
wrong –> pit
pit –> loom
loom –> hook
hook –> bait
bait –> your
To make the chain this long, a lot of “cheating” was needed. I used near-homonyms instead of perfect homonyms (Thai vowels and tones are different from English).
You missed my point. I like puzzles with difficult challenges if I can get a handle on them. In this case, an approach that might have worked was to type a word into Google Translate and iterate through the several dozen languages Google offers as target. That didn’t seem like fun. Some puzzles come with an implicit or explicit caveat, like “Don’t bother with this puzzle if you’ve forgotten all your plane geometry.” Your puzzle came with the caveat “Don’t bother with this puzzle if you don’t know language X but I won’t tell you what X is.”
I guessed, to avoid this arguably bad construction, that the “unknown language” might be Pig Latin or something more accessible to an English-speaking audience. But that didn’t help.
I used near-homonyms instead of perfect homonyms (Thai vowels and tones are different from English).