[net.nlang] Puzzles

scott (06/29/82)

I gave a linguistic puzzle to some friends of mine whom
I see regularly.  They took a week to work on it and finally
gave up and asked me for a new one.  Does anybody out there have a
list of favorite linguistic puzzles?  The one that they eventually
gave up on was to describe the difference between a Sri Lankan
"b" and an American "b". (They are from Sri Lanka and their
native language is english).  The answer was that a Sri Lankan
"b" is unaspirated.

	Scott Deerwester

(Is anybody still submitting things to this group?  I've
mailed three requests to this group with no responses...
Is anybody out there??)

rvpalliende (06/30/82)

How can someone "work out" a puzzle whose solution is not logical?
At most you can research the answer. But then, it's not very interesting.
By the way, what happened with the answer to a linguistic puzzle
posted some weeks ago? It concerned some <Maranathi?> pronouns,
and its solution was supposed to be deductive. (I never worked that out,
but it didn't seem very easy)

(It's amazing. Six lines ov text, and the word "ov" doesn't appear!)

jon (07/01/82)

(It's amazing. Six lines ov text, and the word "ov" doesn't appear!)

Since "ov" is not a word (at least in English) I hardly find that surprising.

bdfinch (07/02/82)

re. "ov" is not an english word:

	Touche' !

ecn-pa.scott (07/15/82)

Sorry about being lax in getting the solution to that puzzle out.
I'll write it out and post it in the next couple of days.  Since
nobody mentioned it for several weeks, I assumed that there was
no interest.  There is a solution to it.

	Scott Deerwester