there are eight choices. four of them are Japanese (??) characters….is someone hacking??

Voting for tomorrow's game. Expressions:
European popfestivals Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
blue prehistoric mammals
おおつま しちいれしようけん
しとく ちゆうかりようり

I had typed two question marks in-between the parenthesis, textile markup altered that….what language are the symbols?

I also typed a question mark at the end of the word hacking, but textile markup also deleted that!

And again. I have no idea how is that possible.

neither have I. Well, more chance my topic is chosen ;-)

Those are Japanese (hiragana) characters.
Google translate says they mean
“Oh speak up to try to pawn”
and “Chiyuu than keep or use”.

this time, there are three sets of Japanese expressions. Can anyone determine who's suggestion dropped off? is there a formula for selecting these? with only 29 players, and a purely defined formula, I would think one could logically deduce who quoted the one quote that no longer is a choice. (?)

I am just going out on a limb here, just hazarding a guess, but maybe, at least four of the 29 players are the same person, possibly Japanese….

こうきゆうひ

まきはら

みし

those Japanese characters did not copy and paste very well! worked fine last time!

So.
1) Richard is doing it.
or
2) someone has at least 4 accounts and manage to submit 3 or 4 topics which are proposed for the next week
or
3) a group of players has agreed to propose topics in Japanese, and 3 or 4 are selected each week
or
4) Someone hacked little golem and Richard didn't notice anything, even if he has took part in the last empathy game.
or
5) Aliens
or
6) The US government
or
7) The Russian, the Chinese, the Slovakian or the Japanese government.
or
8) Another government
or
9) It's just a bug.

2,3,4,5 and 9 are really really unlikely.

6,7,8 are really unlikely, no I don't know of any conspiracy theory that mentions this (And I've heard conspiracy theories about anything)

1) Is quite unlikely. (Why would he do this?)

that leaves 10) All the governments in the world has agreed to replace Richard and half of LG players by aliens and by hacking into Little Golem, they introduced a bug that produce Japanese topics. And that would explain the downtime last week too, so that's definitely the good answer.

Does anyone know if the topics are really words in Japanese? Or could they be words in another language displayed in a Japanese font? Tom Ace's Google translations don't sound fluent. Also, hiragana is a phonetic alphabet, so someone could try sounding them out.

I showed them to my Japanese wife and she said they had no meaning in Japanese. She then helped me sound out the phonetics to see if sounded like something in English, but we couldn't make any sense out of it. If nobody else does it sooner I can post the phonetic pronunciation this evening, i.e., in about 6 or 7 hours and we can see if it sounds like something from some other language.

what happens if a player votes for the next expression, puts in a new suggestion but keeps all other input fields empty? Will the new suggestion be considered for the next voting and would this player be shown on the detailed-results-list (player-list)?

@Richard: You have a Japanese wife, like the happy diplomat? Wow.

The 8-character hiragana suggestion is hex

E3818B E38293 E3819B E38293 E381B5 E38293 E38188 E38293

in the page source fetched from littlegolem.net. That's the UTF-8 representation of unicode characters (hex)

304B 3093 305B 3093 3075 3093 3048 3093

which are hiragana KA N SE N HU N E N. I seem to recall that the 49- or 50-character hiragana and katakana “alphabets” are syllabaries. Most consist of a consonant sound and the following vowel, with 5 or 6 just for a lone vowel. N is (Correct me if I'm wrong.) the only lone consonant. My dimmest recollection is that N appears only at the end of a word in Japanese. (E.g. Hon Kon, the Japanese name of Hong Kong) So I presume if this is Japanese at all, that it's at least 4 separate words kan, sen, hun, en.

かんせんふんえん

Going back to the very first post in this thread, the “official” transliteration of the two Japanese lines is:

ootsuma shichiire shouken
shitoku chuukaryouri

So, as MG suggested, can anybody sound that out so that it makes sense in some language? You need to be a bit flexible with your pronunciation since, among other issues, Japanese only has 5 vowel sounds.

I don't have Japanese characters installed on the computer I'm using, so I can't really see what's going on, but the romanizations seem to have some real Japanese words among them – although the phrases as a whole are opaque to me.

Ootsuma - ? Possibly a name.
shichiire - can mean “pawning things”
shouken - bonds/securities

shitoku ? - can mean a Japanese historic era.
chuukaryori - Chinese-style cooking (and one of the first Japanese words I learned in school)

kansen - a homophony-laden word with all too much pun-potential, meaning things like “infection/contagion”, “main route/line”, “sea vessels”, “watching sports”, “sweat gland”, and “government-appointed”. (A silver kwatloon will be awarded to whomever uses all those in one sensible sentence.)
hunen - ?

Paul - lol

While watching sports on various main route government appointed sea vessels, I acquired an infection of the sweat glands.

the current choices for the next topic consist of FIVE Japanese symbols and only three legit phrases…

Is the Hiragana Richard's way of saying he's not getting enough good topic suggestions?

How are suggestions selected for voting?
Are they the suggestions made by the ten top scorers of a round?
Or can a suggestion persist for a few rounds even if not suggested again?

(I'm pretty new to reading the empathy forum;
bear with me if this had been covered before.)

Nobody know this for sure (except Richard)!

No Hiragana in the current (medical terms) candidate expressions.

looks like it's fixed…