More Linguistics Puzzles
Due to the popularity of my previous posting of linguistics puzzles, I’ve translated some more puzzles from the online book Problems from Linguistics Olympiads 1965-1975. I’ve kept the same problem number as in the book; and I’ve used the Unicode encoding for special characters.
Problem 180. Three Tajik sentences in Russian transliteration with their translations are below:
- дӯсти хуби ҳамсояи шумо — a good friend of your neighbor
- ҳамсояи дӯсти хуби шумо — a neighbor of your good friend
- ҳамсояи хуби дӯсти шумо — a good neighbor of your friend
Your task is to assign a meaning to each out of four used Tajik words.
Problem 185. For every sequence of words given below, explain whether it can be used in a grammatically correct English sentence. If it is possible show an example. In the usage there shouldn’t be any extra signs between the given words.
- could to
- he have
- that that
- the John
- he should
- on walked
- the did
Problem 241. In a group of relatives each person is denoted by a lower-case letter and relations by upper-case letters. The relations can be summarized in a table below:
a | b | c | d | e | f | g | |
a | — | A | A | B | D | E | E |
b | A | — | A | E | D | E | E |
c | F | F | — | G | H | I | I |
d | H | J | J | — | K | L | L |
e | B | B | B | N | — | N | N |
f | O | O | D | L | Q | — | A |
g | J | J | H | L | K | F | — |
The table should be read as following: if the intersection of the row x and the column y has symbol Z, then x is Z with respect to y. It is known that e is a man.
You task is to find out the meaning of every capital letter in the table (each letter can be represented as one English word).
Share:




