unforum

[ramsfan]

I think that's most likely.
The problems are several. First we're not sure whether it's countries, languages or natives. I don't think it's languages otherwise why would you have several representatives for the european languages, and all the problems of not knowing how many languages to count for some countries. So I think countries or natives are the most likely. Usually these will be the same, but say British and American are more likely than Britain or America.

Then we don't know whether the language to be used for these answers is english or native. I think it's more likely to be native because otherwise there are 2 J's, which are difficult to anagram, and Von's clue.

Thirdly some countries have different possibilities eg U/A for USA, and Jordan (as above), U/G/B for UK, I/Y for Israel, A/M for Egypt, S/G for Georgia, D/H/N/T for South Korea, I/E for Ireland, ?T/C for Chad.

Lastly there's a hell of a lot of letters, hence the hope that language, english or something similar can be eliminated. Sure this is irrelevant, but I'll mention it anyway. Motherese is the technical term for the cooing mothers make to babies. Don't think there's any way it can be in the answer. You can also get bosom from the letters, but I'm thinking about work too much.

[Grizy]

From the Wiki

[cassandra]

I assumed this had been done already, but doesn't seem to be noted on the thread. Looking at an interesting anagram result, has anyone officially tried

[Grizy]

I think it has been tried before but can confirm

[Grizy]

By taking the first letter of countries with republic in their title I managed to make

[Magma]

Is there some property that each country shares with another, like a migrating language? What happens if you play "Join the language-migration dots"?

[Rifflesby]

In reference to my earlier comment about Hawaii, I emailed Customer Service. Unfortunately, the response I got was: "We can't comment on whether or not Hawaii not appearing on the map is intentional."

Foo. :/

[Dranioth]

I had an Idea today, Could the answer be something that has possible touched all of the countires in a certain way?

Possibly:

[Alexia]

just had a thought maybe it could be something to do with poitics or Democracy maybe?

[UKver2.0]

Just for fun, add a "W" to your list of letters if you get sick of the same stupid anagrams. It really helps if you are trying to form questions (since the answer form says, "What is the answer?) seeing as most questions start with words that have W's in them (who, what, where, when, why, how). And if you don't like that none of these countries start with a "W", you can always pretend that the little blob above New Caledonia is Wake Island. You get things like "What language uses only numbers..."

I'm an idiot.

[ramsfan]

Thought it could as well be What languages use only numbers. Just requires Guam to move down the atlas a bit to get the right number of letters and then some unknown letter swapping.

Fears "my card hasn't got that smudge" survey.

Tried

[GasparLewis]

If it's number language you want, I would recommend:

[modern_hero]

Well, with random guesses, can confirm it is not

[Hunting4Treasure]

Bringing up 'numbers' and computer codes again, I still like BABEL.

Doing a search for BABLE (accidental misspelling) and CODE took me in another direction, bringing up this interesting site. It lists *all* languages in 'ISO 639-2 language' (alpha-3 code). Maybe we need to look at the languages' 3-letter-codes?

I don't like the idea of anagramming, and I don't see any way of ordering all these countries/languages. *Maybe* if we used the 3-letter codes, and listed them in alphabetical order, something would be spelled out (could be 2nd or 3rd letters)?

Also, for the heck of it, would someone please try ASTURIAN? It's another name for Spain and Portugal's (romance) BABLE language.

I wish I had this card... I have a lot of ideas, but some seem too silly to post.

(Wild train of thought... MOTHERs have BABEs, and all BABEs BABBLE. )

[rockhound]

I have tried to work something out with thoses codes to no avail, The wikipedia has more on the codes as well as a good map of language dispersion, also wikiproject language is worth a look, BUT linking anything to the countries on the map seems impossible to say the least. Cant try your sugestion as am locked out for the day.