Six days ago I gave you a linguistics quiz that Lynne Murphy designed for the holiday season. The quiz is reprinted below so you don’t have to flip back and forth.

Here are the answers, with annotations in some cases:

• Round 1
  1. Albanian. (No other major languages are in this branch of Indo-European.)
  2. Basque. (Basque is a language isolate, i.e. unrelated to any other language (as far as we know)).
  3. Czech.
  4. Danish.
  5. Estonian. (This is a Finno-Ugric language.)
  6. Finnish. (Another Finno-Ugric language—which is probably not a surprise once you know it is Finiish).
  7. Greek (of course).
  8. Hungarian (related to #5, Estonian, and #6, Finnish).
  9. Irish (which some people call Gaelic, but that confuses it with Scottish Gaelic).
  10. They are in alphabetical order, with every answer n beginning with the nth letter of the alphabet.
• Round 2
  1. January.
  2. Xmas.
  3. Chimney.
  4. Mull.
  5. Gift.
  6. Panettone.
  7. Vixen.
  8. Tinsel.
  9. Santa Claus.
  10. Hanukkah.

And here is the reprint of the quiz:

Categories: Linguistics, Teaching & Learning