General

Question 1

More than half of the people in the Philippines speak Pilipino, a variation of this native language.

Answer 1

Tagalog

Question 2

Coptic was the last phase of this language whose 5,000-year recorded history is the longest known.

Answer 2

Egyptian

Question 3

Which language translates literally as “coastal language.”

Answer 3

Swahili

Question 4

This Amharic word for “flower” is a girl’s name and part of a world capital’s name.

Answer 4

Ababa

Question 5

What Yiddish term for “spectator” is used in games such as chess for the practice, often highly frowned upon, of making comments that can be heard by the players?

Answer 5

Kibitz / Kibitzer

Question 6

What consonant is expressed in International Morse Code by a single dash?

Answer 6

T

Question 7

Of the 6 official U.N. languages, it’s the one that is written in a cursive form only.

Answer 7

Arabic

Question 8

From Turkish for “napkin”, this craft is all about the knots.

Answer 8

Macrame

Question 9

Homophones: a Roman food goddess, or another word for “TV show”

Answer 9

Ceres, Series

Question 10

A word from the Melee as well as the Malay, to “run” this way is to be wild and frenzied.

Answer 10

Amok

Question 11

Named after one of the three sons of Noah, this is the term given to a group of languages with Afroasiatic origins. Today they are spoken by over 330 million people across the Middle East and Northern Africa.

Answer 11

Semitic

Question 12

What term, which today refers to meaningless speech, has historically referred to a West African god, and originates etymologically from a Mandinka word for a ceremonial masked dancer? It provides the title for author Ishmael Reed’s enduring 1972 novel, in which the author himself defines the term—quoting the American Heritage Dictionary—as a “magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away.”

Answer 12

Mumbo Jumbo

Question 13

The use of what term to denote a certain period in European history was not actually in common usage until 1855, when it was first prominently used by French historian Jules Michelet?

Answer 13

Renaissance

Question 14

The word for what military rank originally referred to an officer who would stand in for, or serve in place of, another officer?

Answer 14

Lieutenant

Question 15

(1) When two languages are combined to form another, it becomes this. (2) If that language survives into a new generation, it becomes this.

Answer 15

(1) Pidgin; (2) Creole

Question 16

Foreign policy might be found in your closet. What color, a Hindustani loanword (based on a Persian root for dust or dirt), came into English when the British army realized its penchant for bright red coats was impractical in places like Ethiopia, Sudan, and South Africa?

Answer 16

Khaki

Question 17

What English phrase translates to Arabic as saba al-khayr, to Mandarin Chinese as zao shang hao, to Hebrew as boker tov, and to Russian as dobraye utra?

Answer 17

Good Morning

Question 18

The Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic alphabets are all based on the 22-letter, consonant-only alphabet of what ancient civilization originally situated in modern-day Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, whose people spoke a Semitic language similar to Hebrew?

Answer 18

Phoenician

Question 19

What name for a late-1950s dance craze is a slang term for “new trend” in its country of origin?

Answer 19

“Bossa nova” means the hot new thing in Brazilian Portuguese.

Question 20

George Johnson of The New York Times called this language “just broken German, more of a linguistic mishmash than a true language”. Even the language’s own speakers called it “zhargon”. To what language of the Ashkenazic Jews of Central and Eastern Europe was Johnson referring?

Answer 20

Yiddish

Question 21

A system known as Devanagari is one of the four most widely adopted and most actively used of its type in the world (probably at #3 or #4, though exact numbers would be impossible to determine). Name any one of the other three of these systems with the greatest prevalence.

Answer 21

Latin/Roman, Chinese/Hanji/Kanji, Arabic

Question 22

Poses in yoga, such as downward-facing dog, mountain pose, and tabletop, are known by what term, from the Sanskrit for “posture” or “seat”?

Answer 22

Asanas

Question 23

What common food item, of which the average American consumes over three pounds per year, has a name derived from the Greek for “pearl” and originally had that name with a prefix derived from the Latin for “(olive) oil”?

Answer 23

Margarine

• Pearl in Greek - margaritari
• Oil in Latin - oleum

Question 24

What literary term, which translates to English as “novel with a key”, is used for a work in which some (or all) of the characters represent real individuals?

Answer 24

Roman a clef

Question 25

This is a Hawaiian word for individuals who are not Native Hawaiian. It was originally most commonly applied to people of European ancestry.

Answer 25

Haole

Question 26

The letter thorn (þ, also known as þorn) was in the alphabets of some historical Germanic languages, including Old Norse and Old English, but lives on today exclusively in the orthography of what modern language?

Answer 26

Icelandic

Question 27

What word for a magnate or great personage comes from the name of the Muslim dynasty, of Turkish origin with strong Persian influence, that ruled India from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries?

Answer 27

Mogul (Mughal)