I find it hilarious that when I downloaded the first set, I was immediately defeated by the first problem. Not because of the linguistics, but because I cannot for the life of me remember the other countries in South America.
Is it not enough to see patterns in the names, there is only like five letters missing, they have some nifty problem solving ideas in linguistics. I solved the barcode EAN - 13 translation they had in 2011 thatI spent what felt like two hours and my linguist friend just followed an generic algorithm.
Yup. I did a Linguistics degree, so this was a great blast from the past.
I got so far as picking out the symbols that were clearly morphological in meaning rather than phonological, then realized I couldn't remember the rest of the countries.
I may have a BA in Linguistics, but I also got a D- on geography.
Right, it claimed you didn’t need background knowledge, but then on that problem you’d need to know the South American countries. They probably should have given you a list of them as an aid there.
(I think the answers were Argentina and Paraguay but didn’t see where to check.)
Edit: also, maybe this thing is my true calling? I solved a problem like this on my first day of Kindergarten. The teacher wrote something on the board in cursive, in the expectation that the kids would be able to read it. (Parents were polled beforehand to verify none of the kids “knew cursive”.) But since I recognized enough of the letters, and had a “side channel” in terms of what things make sense to say, I could translate it, frustrating the lesson.
Based on the letters I knew, the message looked like this (dashes indicate unknown, pipes are spaces):
W - - c o m - | t o | K - - - - - (lots more)
I first figured that the first word must be “welcome”, and then, given a) the “welcome to” plus giant K word, and given b) that the word “kindergarten” was on my mind so strongly that day, and c) it made sense as the next word, I correctly guessed the solution.
I assumed this skill only had application in crypto and maybe reverse engineering, but hey, I’d it’s what linguists do too, maybe I should consider that!
Also useful in understanding ancient manuscripts that have been partly eaten by termites, or where part of the rock has deteriorated; or palimpsests. In short, you should become a professor of medieval literature, like the good Dr. Henry Jones, Sr.
True, but perhaps high school students should know the nations of the world, at least enough to have memory jogged when given 70% of the letters and some misdirection in word endings.
> (I think the answers were Argentina and Paraguay)
Oops.