Ages 15–18 · Grades 9–12 · Linguistics
GlossForge
Given a few sentences in a language and their English meanings, can you work out the grammar and translate a sentence you’ve never seen? That’s a Linguistics Olympiad puzzle — pure pattern-finding, and the most AI-proof format there is, because the rule lives in evidence you reason through, not in a dictionary. Nothing you do leaves this device.
Two decipherment puzzles
- Decipher a word Infer what each piece of a word means from a few examples, then translate one you haven’t seen.
- Decipher word order Work out where the verb goes, then predict a brand-new sentence.
Who you’ll meet — the ideas in play 5
- Gloss — the interlinear line — a word and exactly what each piece means
- Order — where the verb goes: Subject-Verb-Object, or Subject-Object-Verb, or verb-first
- Case — who wears the endings — how a language marks the subject vs the object
- Shift — how sounds change over time, turning one language into another
- Elder Ana — a field linguist — credits every speaker who teaches her a word
How it works
A gloss lines a word up with exactly what each piece means. To decipher, you hunt for minimal pairs — two forms that differ by one piece — because the piece that changes carries the meaning that changed. One comparison, one rule.
Then you test the rule against the rest of the data: a real grammar is consistent — a suffix means the same thing everywhere, and pieces stack in a fixed order. When every example obeys your rules, you can translate a new one and be right, because the language told you. The languages here are made up for practice — real languages belong to the communities who speak them, and are always used with permission and credit.