Details

This book contains linguistic tasks dedicated to the most diverse languages of the world. To solve them, no special knowledge is needed: most readers, most likely, do not know Swedish and Georgian, and hardly anyone knows the Dirbal and Straits languages. Nevertheless, you can find a key to any task by understanding, through logical reasoning, how an unknown language works and how it differs from Russian. Each problem is accompanied by hints, a detailed solution and, most importantly, an afterword in which interesting linguistic phenomena presented in the problem are discussed in more detail. The materials of the collection were published on the popular science site "Elements", but were significantly revised and supplemented for this book. The collection will be useful both for schoolchildren who participate in linguistics olympiads and for adults who are interested in the languages and cultures of the peoples of the world.