Broken Rosetta

Imagine we took the original Rosetta stone and smashed it into pieces, and your task was to reconstruct it and then translate a few more sentences. That's a broken Rosetta problem: one where you have to match phrases or sentences with their counterparts, and then translate some more sentences.

Counting

Although this isn't the numbers section, counting is your best friend here. If there are several words, count up the number of times each word appears in the English translation and in the target language, and see if any counts match. There are also other, less obvious things that you might consider counting:

• person (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.)
• human/nonhuman animate/inanimate
• tense/mood/aspect
• anything else mentioned in either of the other Rosetta sections

The best way to know is to look at the English translations and see what's changing. Are there multiple different tenses? If so, then you should probably count them and try and figure out what's going on in the target language.

1. Using the names, match sentences 2, 3, and 4.
2. Match sentences 1, 5, and 6.
3. Do Q.3.3 before Q.3.2. Recall grammatical gender.
4. Complete the translations. You can check your answers here.

Here's another traditional matching problem, in a similar vein, with some more complicated follow-up tasks.

1. What word appears the most in the English translations? (Note: this word may have multiple English forms!)
2. Most of the sentences have three words. Given the word you discovered in the previous section, what can you tell about the middle word of the Norweigan sentences?
3. You should be able to split the sentences into one group of 2 and one group of 8. The group of 2 allows you to determine a word. From here, try and "untangle" the problem by slowly filling in one word at a time. In doing so, find out what the four word sentences are used for. You may need to count!
4. Below is some information about Norwegian. Using it, figure out how plurals work and complete J2. Keep track of the grammar.
5. Solve task J3. Continue updating your grammar.
6. Check your solution here.

Example Problems