The Language Lover's Puzzle Book

The Language Lover's Puzzle Book PDF Author: Alex Bellos
Publisher: The Experiment
ISBN: 1615198040
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
100 challenging puzzles for would-be codebreakers that also celebrate the uniqueness of language—from hieroglyphics to the sign language of silent monks

The Language Lover's Puzzle Book

The Language Lover's Puzzle Book PDF Author: Alex Bellos
Publisher: The Experiment
ISBN: 1615198040
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
100 challenging puzzles for would-be codebreakers that also celebrate the uniqueness of language—from hieroglyphics to the sign language of silent monks

The Language Lover's Puzzle Book: A World Tour of Languages and Alphabets in 100 Amazing Puzzles (Alex Bellos Puzzle Books)

The Language Lover's Puzzle Book: A World Tour of Languages and Alphabets in 100 Amazing Puzzles (Alex Bellos Puzzle Books) PDF Author: Alex Bellos
Publisher: The Experiment, LLC
ISBN: 1615198059
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
100 wonder-filled word puzzles that thrill and tantalize with the beauty, magic, and weirdness of world language Whether you’re a crossword solver, cryptogram fan, Scrabble addict, or Sudoku savant, The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book is guaranteed to tease your brain and twist your tongue. Puzzle master Alex Bellos begins in Japan, where we can observe some curious counting: boru niko = two balls tsuna nihon = two ropes uma nito = two horses kami nimai = two sheets of paper ashi gohon = five legs ringo goko = five apples sara gomai = five plates kaba goto = five hippos Now, how do the Japanese say “nine cucumbers”?* a) kyuri kyuhon b) kyuri kyuko c) kyuri kyuhiki d) kyuri kyuto Bellos finds the intrigue—and the human element—in a dizzying array of ancient, modern, and even invented tongues, from hieroglyphs to Blissymbolics, Danish to Dothraki. Filled with unusual alphabets, fascinating characters, and intriguing local customs for time-telling, naming children, and more, this is a bravura book of brainteasers and beyond—it’s a globe-trotting, time-traveling celebration of language. *The word endings depend on shape: Flat things end in -mai and spherical things end in -ko. Cucumbers are long things (like ropes and legs), so they end in -hon. The answer is (a)!

Puzzles in Logic, Languages and Computation

Puzzles in Logic, Languages and Computation PDF Author: Dragomir Radev
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642343724
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
This is the second volume of a unique collection that brings together the best English-language problems created for students competing in the Computational Linguistics Olympiad. These problems are representative of the diverse areas presented in the competition and designed with three principles in mind: · To challenge the student analytically, without requiring any explicit knowledge or experience in linguistics or computer science; · To expose the student to the different kinds of reasoning required when encountering a new phenomenon in a language, both as a theoretical topic and as an applied problem; · To foster the natural curiosity students have about the workings of their own language, as well as to introduce them to the beauty and structure of other languages; · To learn about the models and techniques used by computers to understand human language. Aside from being a fun intellectual challenge, the Olympiad mimics the skills used by researchers and scholars in the field of computational linguistics. In an increasingly global economy where businesses operate across borders and languages, having a strong pool of computational linguists is a competitive advantage, and an important component to both security and growth in the 21st century. This collection of problems is a wonderful general introduction to the field of linguistics through the analytic problem solving technique. "A fantastic collection of problems for anyone who is curious about how human language works! These books take serious scientific questions and present them in a fun, accessible way. Readers exercise their logical thinking capabilities while learning about a wide range of human languages, linguistic phenomena, and computational models. " - Kevin Knight, USC Information Sciences Institute

The Language Lover's Puzzle Book

The Language Lover's Puzzle Book PDF Author: Alex Bellos
Publisher: Guardian Faber Publishing
ISBN: 9781783352197
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description


Perilous Problems for Puzzle Lovers: Math, Logic & Word Puzzles to Challenge Your Brain (Alex Bellos Puzzle Books)

Perilous Problems for Puzzle Lovers: Math, Logic & Word Puzzles to Challenge Your Brain (Alex Bellos Puzzle Books) PDF Author: Alex Bellos
Publisher: The Experiment, LLC
ISBN: 1615197192
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
Put your wits—and survival instincts—to the test! Publisher’s Note: Perilous Problems for Puzzle Lovers was previously published in the UK under the title So You Think You’ve Got Problems? In Perilous Problems for Puzzle Lovers, Alex Bellos collects 125 of the world’s greatest stumpers—many dangerous to your person, and all dangerous to your pride. Brace yourself to wrestle with wordplay, grapple with geometry, and scramble for survival. For example . . . Ten lions and a sheep are in a pen. Any lion who eats the sheep will fall asleep. A sleeping lion will be eaten by another lion, who falls asleep in turn. If the lions are all perfect logicians, what happens? Bellos pairs his fiendish brainteasers with fascinating history, so you’ll meet Alcuin, Sam Loyd, and other puzzle masters of yore—in between deranged despots and wily jailers with an unaccountable taste for riddles. Will you make it out alive? And what about the sheep?

Babel

Babel PDF Author: Gaston Dorren
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 0802146724
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
“Babel is an endlessly interesting book, and you don’t have to have any linguistic training to enjoy it . . . it’s just so much fun to read.” —NPR English is the world language, except that 80 percent of the world doesn’t speak it. Linguist Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world’s people in their mother tongues, you’d need to know no fewer than twenty languages. In Babel, he sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Bengali). Whisking readers along on a delightful journey, he traces how these languages rose to greatness while others fell away, and shows how speakers today handle the foibles of their mother tongues. Whether showcasing tongue-tying phonetics, elegant but complicated writing scripts, or mind-bending quirks of grammar, Babel vividly illustrates that mother tongues are like nations: each has its own customs and beliefs that seem as self-evident to those born into it as they are surprising to outsiders. Babel reveals why modern Turks can’t read books that are a mere 75 years old, what it means in practice for Russian and English to be relatives, and how Japanese developed separate “dialects” for men and women. Dorren also shares his experiences studying Vietnamese in Hanoi, debunks ten myths about Chinese characters, and discovers the region where Swahili became the lingua franca. Witty and utterly fascinating, Babel will change how you look at and listen to the world. “Word nerds of every strain will enjoy this wildly entertaining linguistic study.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Hunt A Killer: The Detective's Puzzle Book

Hunt A Killer: The Detective's Puzzle Book PDF Author: Hunt A Killer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1646043995
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Put your crime-solving wits to the test with codes, ciphers, and more mind-bending puzzles from the groundbreaking creators of Hunt A Killer. In Hunt A Killer: The Detective’s Puzzle Book, you’ll meet up with private eye Michelle Gray who needs you to hit the books and fine-tune your investigative skills before the next big murder case. Under her expert guidance, you’ll start with “Investigative Best Practices” before diving into a world of curious ciphers, devious riddles, and other intriguing logic puzzles all designed to take you from amateur sleuth to a top-notch lead detective. With non-narrative puzzles, you can pick up this training manual anytime you need to sharpen your skills, between episodes, or whenever you need a fun challenge. Whether you’re a Hunt A Killer member, armchair detective, or logic puzzle junkie, these deceptively difficult but always fun puzzles will have you breaking codes and cracking Hunt A Killer cases in no time. So pick up a pen, grab your magnifying glass, and get sleuthing.

The Do-It-Yourself Escape Room Book

The Do-It-Yourself Escape Room Book PDF Author: Paige Ellsworth Lyman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 151075881X
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 223

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Book Description
A practical guide to create your very own escape room! Contains over 300 puzzle ideas! *Purchase includes link and password to download one full step-by-step escape room kit.* Now present in all fifty states, escape rooms offer a fun activity for corporate events, team training, youth groups, and all types of parties. But what if you could develop your very own escape room in the comfort of your own home? In this fun, full-color book, Paige Ellsworth Lyman, founder of TheGameGal.com, offers a practical guide to creating your own do-it-yourself escape room. Divided into two parts, the first half covers what an escape room is, how to develop theme and plot, how to set up a room, how to structure clues, and how to run the event. The second half provides multiple chapters of clues and challenges to use in your escape room, including codes, ciphers, mathematics, puzzles, physical objects, and more. This book is the perfect gift for puzzle enthusiasts looking for new challenges and families that are bored at home!

Through the Language Glass

Through the Language Glass PDF Author: Guy Deutscher
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
ISBN: 9781429970112
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A masterpiece of linguistics scholarship, at once erudite and entertaining, confronts the thorny question of how—and whether—culture shapes language and language, culture Linguistics has long shied away from claiming any link between a language and the culture of its speakers: too much simplistic (even bigoted) chatter about the romance of Italian and the goose-stepping orderliness of German has made serious thinkers wary of the entire subject. But now, acclaimed linguist Guy Deutscher has dared to reopen the issue. Can culture influence language—and vice versa? Can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts? Could our experience of the world depend on whether our language has a word for "blue"? Challenging the consensus that the fundaments of language are hard-wired in our genes and thus universal, Deutscher argues that the answer to all these questions is—yes. In thrilling fashion, he takes us from Homer to Darwin, from Yale to the Amazon, from how to name the rainbow to why Russian water—a "she"—becomes a "he" once you dip a tea bag into her, demonstrating that language does in fact reflect culture in ways that are anything but trivial. Audacious, delightful, and field-changing, Through the Language Glass is a classic of intellectual discovery.

Ticket to Ride Puzzle Book

Ticket to Ride Puzzle Book PDF Author: Richard Wolfrik Galland
Publisher: Welbeck Publishing
ISBN: 9781787395985
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The official Ticket to Ride Puzzle book, offering the same fun game-play experience as the boardgame and hours of endless fun in a book!