11 ms·

International Linguistics Olympiad – Sample Problems

304 points by _lnwk 5y ago

Mezzie 5y ago
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. Oops.
- pastage 5y ago
  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. https://ioling.org/booklets/iol-2011-indiv-prob.en-us.pdf https://ioling.org/booklets/iol-2011-indiv-prob.en-us.pdf
  - Mezzie 5y ago
    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.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  I tried to solve it and came up with (linked to avoid spoilers): https://dpaste.com/AR8NGYWTE https://dpaste.com/AR8NGYWTE Did others arrive to the same?
  - sneak 5y ago
    The solutions are linked below the quiz.
- SilasX 5y ago
  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!
  - gowld 5y ago
    > you’d need to know the South American countries 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) Incorrect.
  - mcswell 5y ago
    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.
  - ummonk 5y ago
    Go back and redo the countries. Paraguay is wrong. I think you're missing some subtle differences in Georgian characters.
- ummonk 5y ago
  Yeah I finally had to look at a South American country list (in English) to work out the second country lol.
lofatdairy 5y ago
Anyone else find it funny to see toki pona under "hard problems". It's certainly a tough language to translate because it's interpretative and vague, but there's a certain irony in a language that's intended to be easy to learn finding itself there.
Claude_Shannon 5y ago
What are they? For major part, they are interesting puzzles. Let's take the second part for example. You have some sentences in Ancient Greek, and you have translations in English. Your goal is to find which translation is for what sentence. How would you go on about that? In this case, for example, by taking a look at the sentences. You could count how many times a word appears, and then compare that. And so on.
- yccs27 5y ago
  It seems like you can solve most of them just as a puzzle, but some linguistic knowledge and intuition would definitely help. I like the concept.
  - Claude_Shannon 5y ago
    Yes! They can be solved as a puzzle, but should you happen to know some linguistic concepts or be familiar with, out of lack of better words, lesser-known languages like Navajo, Armenian or so on, it helps too.
  - pxeger1 5y ago
    Yeah. Someone else in the thread said they were more like computational puzzles, which I kind of agree with - they're a lot of just logic - but some background knowledge of etymology is also helpful. For the first puzzle, if you didn't know Brazil might be translated as something like "brazilia", then you would have struggled.
- raverbashing 5y ago
  It's not hard, but some passing knowledge of the languages definitely helps (like the Aragonese table is almost trivial for people who know a Romance language), but especially how linguistic transformations happen
  - yccs27 5y ago
    Definitely. OTOH, the Japanese braille question was more of a pattern recognition puzzle.
rukuu001 5y ago
Fave intern had a linguistics background, and had a new puzzle to post every lunchtime. I thought it was just her, but I guess puzzles are big in the ‘ling’ world
- Claude_Shannon 5y ago
  I had them in my high school equivalent in Poland. We were encouraged to take a part in it.
qsort 5y ago
A nerd snipe if there ever was one.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nothis 5y ago
My browser threw a hissy fit, if you just want to download the PDF with the sample problems, this is the link: https://hosteagle.club/booklets/samples.en.pdf?__cpo=aHR0cHM6Ly9pb2xpbmcub3Jn https://hosteagle.club/booklets/samples.en.pdf?__cpo=aHR0cHM...
- nikanj 5y ago
  Your link is also broken
  - pkage 5y ago
    This should work: https://ioling.org/booklets/samples.en.pdf https://ioling.org/booklets/samples.en.pdf
    - melenaboija 5y ago
      Broken
      - notRobot 5y ago
        Works for me.
mFixman 5y ago
The part I miss the most from high school were these kinds of competitions. Having to study random fun things and being rewarded for it was peak happiness for teenage me.
- Avamander 5y ago
  At least in IT there are challenge platforms and hackatons, in cybersecurity there are CTF's, training sites and bug bounty programs. So at least in those aspects there's a possibility to learn new things. I haven't heard much about similar things being available for adults in other STEM areas unfortunately. Maybe someone else does?
- Claude_Shannon 5y ago
  That hits so close. :( I used to take part in this, and informatics olympiad, but I never got anywhere. Even if I never really was good at this, I still miss these things. Now that I'm studying, there are no such things. :|
  - amelius 5y ago
    There's the ACM competition for teams. https://icpc.global/ https://icpc.global/
    - qumpis 5y ago
      And all kinds of competitive programming events, such as Codeforces.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - hnfong 5y ago
    I used to find this super fun: https://ipsc.ksp.sk/ https://ipsc.ksp.sk/ Too bad they didn't continue doing it though. The other more "serious" programming contests, ACM, Google Code Jam, Top Coder, Codeforces, etc etc -- felt a bit too artificial and too "serious" for my tastes. But if you found competitive programming fun you might like them too.
4cao 5y ago
The puzzles are interesting but I'm not sure how much they overlap with the field of linguistics in general. They seem better described as problems in computational linguistics. In all the questions there is the implicit assumption that the grammar of a language is based on a set of rules that can be reproduced and reapplied. This is hardly the case with natural languages, which, rather than sets of rules, are more like vast sets of exceptions to very few rules. While tools such as statistical analysis have been succesfully applied to analyzing languages, expecting linguistics to work like mathematics seems unnecessarily limiting. To illustrate with an example, think of a similarly-constructed problem in English. Can you correctly deduce the missing words just by reproducing the patterns below? ox - oxen / box - ? mouse - mice / grouse - ? dish - dishes / fish - ? Separately, there's also the broader issue that languages are primarily what we speak, to which the writing conventions are secondary. In these examples, we're only looking at how things are written, which is yet another filter that gives an incomplete view.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  > They seem better described as problems in computational linguistics. A linguist can deduce that, because that is written on the sample-problems document.
- otabdeveloper4 5y ago
  Both "boxen" and "fishes" are very well attested in real English usage.
  - dahak27 5y ago
    In a way that proves the point as well though - not only are there inconsistent rules there are also seemingly under-determined rules where you can use one of many options (but only sometimes!)
  - 4cao 5y ago
    The noun "boxen" is only used as a joke ("Unix boxen"), which is precisely why I thought it would make a cromulent example. And you're of course correct that "fishes" exists as a plural form too.
karimf 5y ago
Whenever I tell someone I was competing for International Biology Olympiad, they were always saying, "Uh I hate biology, it is just memorizing names." Yes, biology exam in school is just memorizing, but it's a totally different beast for the international competition. You still need to know basic biology, but more often than not, the solution is in the problem. It's more of reading graph, recognizing pattern, and inferring conclusion based on the data provided. I only reached national level because my lab skill was garbage, but still, fun times.
- jan_Inkepa 5y ago
  I find it interesting - for me, the existence of an olympiad for a subject is a kind of immediate proof that there's plenty of room for a particular kind of problem-solving in it (which you don't necessarily get ready-to-hand in all fields of knowledge/research).
- Claude_Shannon 5y ago
  May I ask, can you say something more? I'm interested in how that would have looked like.
  - karimf 5y ago
    After reading the problems again, well, I might have to take my words back. When I said basic biology, it's not high-school biology, but college-level biology. There are five main topics: molecular cell biology, anatomy and physiology of animals, anatomy and physiology of plants, genetics, and ecology. If you want to get a medal in the international competition, then, you probably need to read the text book material for each topic to get the basic concepts. For example, for molecular cell biology, you need to know about electrophoresis. My point was, in the exam, you won't be asked about what is electrophoresis. They will give you an example of an experiment/published paper, give you the background of that experiment, give you the experiment results (including electrophoresis results), and then ask you about the conclusion of the experiment. I don't understand why they protect the past exams with a password[0], but here's one sample question from my archive: https://i.imgur.com/nMW7g9b.jpg https://i.imgur.com/nMW7g9b.jpg Feel free to reach out to me via email if you want to discuss more. [0] https://www.ibo-info.org/en/info/papers.html https://www.ibo-info.org/en/info/papers.html
enkid 5y ago
If you like these types of puzzles, I'd suggest getting The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book, which is a very accessible curated collection of ILO problems.
bhussai20 5y ago
In the deepest parts of my heart, I wish there was a programming language version of this. It would make a good interview question to simulate reading a codebase in an unfamiliar language (without mixing the question to also test for problem-solving skills).
amznbyebyebye 5y ago
What are the other 12 Olympiads? I’m only aware of Biology, Math, Informatics, physics, Chemistry, and now Linguistics (which I wasn’t aware was a category in 2003).
- singularity2001 5y ago
  https://ioling.org/problems/by_year/#1 https://ioling.org/problems/by_year/#1
- karimf 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Science_Olympiad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Science_Olympiad
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kingcharles 5y ago
Well, this at least made me finally look up the reason why KARAOKE (a Japanese word) is written in Japanese using Katakana (glyphs almost exclusively reserved for the vast number of foreign [mostly English] words Japanese has subsumed): https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/14531/why-is-%E3%82%AB%E3%83%A9%E3%82%AA%E3%82%B1-karaoke-written-in-katakana https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/14531/why-is-%E... tl;dr: kara is a glyph which translates as "empty", but the oke comes from subsuming the English word ORCHESTRA - so karaoke is only half Japanese and therefore it is written using the system for foreign words.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  It does seem like actually knowing the target language is a major (unfair?) advantage - I couldn't make sense of any of these except for that one, because I can read Japanese, and that made it trivial.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    That's true. If you knew all of those languages (and obviously several of them were incredibly obscure) you could fly through the challenges in seconds.
hdesh 5y ago
What's the criterion for choosing a language for the competition? I took a cursory glance and could not find any Indian language, which is unfortunate given the huge linguistic diversity in India.
- smarinov 5y ago
  I think the only criterion is the presence of a person who was able to create an interesting and suitable problem for the target language and submitted it for inclusion in the IOL. :) Also keep in mind that this is a link only to the sample problems. The actual problems by year had at least Old Indic and Sanskrit poetry: https://ioling.org/problems/by_year https://ioling.org/problems/by_year Maybe also others I couldn't see. Also most probably (some/many? of) the national olympiads in linguistics for the participating countries in the IOL had some problems for Indo-Aryan languages at some level (local, regional, national) over the years. On this website we only see the problems for the international competition. I expect that at some point there will be more languages from more language families.
eganist 5y ago
tackled the georgian translation question during my lunch break. My approach (spoilers): 1. figured out that there's probably a decent 1-1 correlation between letters/sounds between the two languaged, intuited this from comparing the characters for peru and uruguay 2. guessed that not all the names translate perfectly. So for instance, what we refer to as "Brazil" may be "Brazilia" or "Brasilia" elsewhere, and that indeed proves to be the case here when comparing the mapped letters for Brazil in Georgian to Brazil in English. 3. not every letter/sound is represented, so I'd have to fill some gaps. Tested this with the first answer: Argentina. The second answer proved harder because the first letter looked similar enough to a P that it threw me off, but after disregarding it, "Columbia" was a good fit for the letters I knew after accounting for alternate spellings of Colombia (Columbia of course being valid for Washington D.C.)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

304 points by _lnwk 5y ago

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. Oops.

pastage 5y ago
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. https://ioling.org/booklets/iol-2011-indiv-prob.en-us.pdf https://ioling.org/booklets/iol-2011-indiv-prob.en-us.pdf
- Mezzie 5y ago
  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.
kzrdude 5y ago
I tried to solve it and came up with (linked to avoid spoilers): https://dpaste.com/AR8NGYWTE https://dpaste.com/AR8NGYWTE Did others arrive to the same?
- sneak 5y ago
  The solutions are linked below the quiz.
SilasX 5y ago
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!
- gowld 5y ago
  > you’d need to know the South American countries 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) Incorrect.
- mcswell 5y ago
  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.
- ummonk 5y ago
  Go back and redo the countries. Paraguay is wrong. I think you're missing some subtle differences in Georgian characters.
ummonk 5y ago
Yeah I finally had to look at a South American country list (in English) to work out the second country lol.

lofatdairy 5y ago

Anyone else find it funny to see toki pona under "hard problems". It's certainly a tough language to translate because it's interpretative and vague, but there's a certain irony in a language that's intended to be easy to learn finding itself there.

Claude_Shannon 5y ago

What are they? For major part, they are interesting puzzles. Let's take the second part for example. You have some sentences in Ancient Greek, and you have translations in English. Your goal is to find which translation is for what sentence. How would you go on about that? In this case, for example, by taking a look at the sentences. You could count how many times a word appears, and then compare that. And so on.

yccs27 5y ago
It seems like you can solve most of them just as a puzzle, but some linguistic knowledge and intuition would definitely help. I like the concept.
- Claude_Shannon 5y ago
  Yes! They can be solved as a puzzle, but should you happen to know some linguistic concepts or be familiar with, out of lack of better words, lesser-known languages like Navajo, Armenian or so on, it helps too.
- pxeger1 5y ago
  Yeah. Someone else in the thread said they were more like computational puzzles, which I kind of agree with - they're a lot of just logic - but some background knowledge of etymology is also helpful. For the first puzzle, if you didn't know Brazil might be translated as something like "brazilia", then you would have struggled.
raverbashing 5y ago
It's not hard, but some passing knowledge of the languages definitely helps (like the Aragonese table is almost trivial for people who know a Romance language), but especially how linguistic transformations happen
- yccs27 5y ago
  Definitely. OTOH, the Japanese braille question was more of a pattern recognition puzzle.

rukuu001 5y ago

Fave intern had a linguistics background, and had a new puzzle to post every lunchtime. I thought it was just her, but I guess puzzles are big in the ‘ling’ world

Claude_Shannon 5y ago
I had them in my high school equivalent in Poland. We were encouraged to take a part in it.

qsort 5y ago

A nerd snipe if there ever was one.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

nothis 5y ago

My browser threw a hissy fit, if you just want to download the PDF with the sample problems, this is the link: https://hosteagle.club/booklets/samples.en.pdf?__cpo=aHR0cHM6Ly9pb2xpbmcub3Jn https://hosteagle.club/booklets/samples.en.pdf?__cpo=aHR0cHM...

nikanj 5y ago
Your link is also broken
- pkage 5y ago
  This should work: https://ioling.org/booklets/samples.en.pdf https://ioling.org/booklets/samples.en.pdf
  - melenaboija 5y ago
    Broken
    - notRobot 5y ago
      Works for me.

mFixman 5y ago

The part I miss the most from high school were these kinds of competitions. Having to study random fun things and being rewarded for it was peak happiness for teenage me.

Avamander 5y ago
At least in IT there are challenge platforms and hackatons, in cybersecurity there are CTF's, training sites and bug bounty programs. So at least in those aspects there's a possibility to learn new things. I haven't heard much about similar things being available for adults in other STEM areas unfortunately. Maybe someone else does?
Claude_Shannon 5y ago
That hits so close. :( I used to take part in this, and informatics olympiad, but I never got anywhere. Even if I never really was good at this, I still miss these things. Now that I'm studying, there are no such things. :|
- amelius 5y ago
  There's the ACM competition for teams. https://icpc.global/ https://icpc.global/
  - qumpis 5y ago
    And all kinds of competitive programming events, such as Codeforces.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hnfong 5y ago
  I used to find this super fun: https://ipsc.ksp.sk/ https://ipsc.ksp.sk/ Too bad they didn't continue doing it though. The other more "serious" programming contests, ACM, Google Code Jam, Top Coder, Codeforces, etc etc -- felt a bit too artificial and too "serious" for my tastes. But if you found competitive programming fun you might like them too.

4cao 5y ago

The puzzles are interesting but I'm not sure how much they overlap with the field of linguistics in general. They seem better described as problems in computational linguistics. In all the questions there is the implicit assumption that the grammar of a language is based on a set of rules that can be reproduced and reapplied. This is hardly the case with natural languages, which, rather than sets of rules, are more like vast sets of exceptions to very few rules. While tools such as statistical analysis have been succesfully applied to analyzing languages, expecting linguistics to work like mathematics seems unnecessarily limiting. To illustrate with an example, think of a similarly-constructed problem in English. Can you correctly deduce the missing words just by reproducing the patterns below? ox - oxen / box - ? mouse - mice / grouse - ? dish - dishes / fish - ? Separately, there's also the broader issue that languages are primarily what we speak, to which the writing conventions are secondary. In these examples, we're only looking at how things are written, which is yet another filter that gives an incomplete view.

alisonkisk 5y ago
> They seem better described as problems in computational linguistics. A linguist can deduce that, because that is written on the sample-problems document.
otabdeveloper4 5y ago
Both "boxen" and "fishes" are very well attested in real English usage.
- dahak27 5y ago
  In a way that proves the point as well though - not only are there inconsistent rules there are also seemingly under-determined rules where you can use one of many options (but only sometimes!)
- 4cao 5y ago
  The noun "boxen" is only used as a joke ("Unix boxen"), which is precisely why I thought it would make a cromulent example. And you're of course correct that "fishes" exists as a plural form too.

karimf 5y ago

Whenever I tell someone I was competing for International Biology Olympiad, they were always saying, "Uh I hate biology, it is just memorizing names." Yes, biology exam in school is just memorizing, but it's a totally different beast for the international competition. You still need to know basic biology, but more often than not, the solution is in the problem. It's more of reading graph, recognizing pattern, and inferring conclusion based on the data provided. I only reached national level because my lab skill was garbage, but still, fun times.

jan_Inkepa 5y ago
I find it interesting - for me, the existence of an olympiad for a subject is a kind of immediate proof that there's plenty of room for a particular kind of problem-solving in it (which you don't necessarily get ready-to-hand in all fields of knowledge/research).
Claude_Shannon 5y ago
May I ask, can you say something more? I'm interested in how that would have looked like.
- karimf 5y ago
  After reading the problems again, well, I might have to take my words back. When I said basic biology, it's not high-school biology, but college-level biology. There are five main topics: molecular cell biology, anatomy and physiology of animals, anatomy and physiology of plants, genetics, and ecology. If you want to get a medal in the international competition, then, you probably need to read the text book material for each topic to get the basic concepts. For example, for molecular cell biology, you need to know about electrophoresis. My point was, in the exam, you won't be asked about what is electrophoresis. They will give you an example of an experiment/published paper, give you the background of that experiment, give you the experiment results (including electrophoresis results), and then ask you about the conclusion of the experiment. I don't understand why they protect the past exams with a password[0], but here's one sample question from my archive: https://i.imgur.com/nMW7g9b.jpg https://i.imgur.com/nMW7g9b.jpg Feel free to reach out to me via email if you want to discuss more. [0] https://www.ibo-info.org/en/info/papers.html https://www.ibo-info.org/en/info/papers.html

enkid 5y ago

If you like these types of puzzles, I'd suggest getting The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book, which is a very accessible curated collection of ILO problems.

bhussai20 5y ago

In the deepest parts of my heart, I wish there was a programming language version of this. It would make a good interview question to simulate reading a codebase in an unfamiliar language (without mixing the question to also test for problem-solving skills).

amznbyebyebye 5y ago

What are the other 12 Olympiads? I’m only aware of Biology, Math, Informatics, physics, Chemistry, and now Linguistics (which I wasn’t aware was a category in 2003).

singularity2001 5y ago
https://ioling.org/problems/by_year/#1 https://ioling.org/problems/by_year/#1
karimf 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Science_Olympiad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Science_Olympiad

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kingcharles 5y ago

Well, this at least made me finally look up the reason why KARAOKE (a Japanese word) is written in Japanese using Katakana (glyphs almost exclusively reserved for the vast number of foreign [mostly English] words Japanese has subsumed): https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/14531/why-is-%E3%82%AB%E3%83%A9%E3%82%AA%E3%82%B1-karaoke-written-in-katakana https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/14531/why-is-%E... tl;dr: kara is a glyph which translates as "empty", but the oke comes from subsuming the English word ORCHESTRA - so karaoke is only half Japanese and therefore it is written using the system for foreign words.

commandlinefan 5y ago
It does seem like actually knowing the target language is a major (unfair?) advantage - I couldn't make sense of any of these except for that one, because I can read Japanese, and that made it trivial.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  That's true. If you knew all of those languages (and obviously several of them were incredibly obscure) you could fly through the challenges in seconds.

hdesh 5y ago

What's the criterion for choosing a language for the competition? I took a cursory glance and could not find any Indian language, which is unfortunate given the huge linguistic diversity in India.

smarinov 5y ago
I think the only criterion is the presence of a person who was able to create an interesting and suitable problem for the target language and submitted it for inclusion in the IOL. :) Also keep in mind that this is a link only to the sample problems. The actual problems by year had at least Old Indic and Sanskrit poetry: https://ioling.org/problems/by_year https://ioling.org/problems/by_year Maybe also others I couldn't see. Also most probably (some/many? of) the national olympiads in linguistics for the participating countries in the IOL had some problems for Indo-Aryan languages at some level (local, regional, national) over the years. On this website we only see the problems for the international competition. I expect that at some point there will be more languages from more language families.

eganist 5y ago

tackled the georgian translation question during my lunch break. My approach (spoilers): 1. figured out that there's probably a decent 1-1 correlation between letters/sounds between the two languaged, intuited this from comparing the characters for peru and uruguay 2. guessed that not all the names translate perfectly. So for instance, what we refer to as "Brazil" may be "Brazilia" or "Brasilia" elsewhere, and that indeed proves to be the case here when comparing the mapped letters for Brazil in Georgian to Brazil in English. 3. not every letter/sound is represented, so I'd have to fill some gaps. Tested this with the first answer: Argentina. The second answer proved harder because the first letter looked similar enough to a P that it threw me off, but after disregarding it, "Columbia" was a good fit for the letters I knew after accounting for alternate spellings of Colombia (Columbia of course being valid for Washington D.C.)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]