Open round | 10 points | 90.32% | Problem statement | Official solution | Tags: Writing system
First step of a writing system problem is to figure out if it's alphabetic or syllabic. Here we have enough glyphs per word to say that it's alphabetic—in fact we should panic a bit because some words have more glyphs than their romanization! I will be denoting each glyph first by its dark flag and then by its light flag, so for example the first gesture in "flea" is (BL, TR) (dark flag on the bottom left, light flag on the top right).
Looking more closely, we see that there are a lot of repetitions of gestures without corresponding repetitions in the romanization. For example, "naomi" has three repeating (L, R) gestures and two repeating (BL, TR) ones. This means it probably has nothing to do with the sounds at all. Indeed, we just need to squint a bit to see that... the gestures resemble the shapes of the katakana. For example, (L, R) + (BL, TR) = ナ; (L, R) + (T, B) + (BL, TR) = オ.
Now onto E1. iii ア = D, iv ミ = H, v モ = C have already appeared in the examples. That leaves i テ = A, ii ヨ = E, vi ヌ = F, vii セ = B. The remaining letter, G, looks most like ヰ.