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A calm warm study with a globe, a teapot, old suitcases and shelves of dictionaries, a teenager comparing two languages in a notebook

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: the rule lives in evidence you reason through, not in a dictionary. Nothing you do leaves this device.

Decipher your first word →

Two decipherment puzzles

A case · you decide Ana deciphers from a notebook → A field linguist finds the rules by minimal pairs and tested consistency — and credits every speaker who taught her.
Who you’ll meet — the ideas in play 4
  • 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 — the Talvi object ending in Decipher a word
  • 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.

Runs on your device: no account, no ads, nothing sent anywhere. Privacy.

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