Lost In Translation
Sam Kendig, Stephanie Dalquist
The five lists of words each have one word that doesn't fit in.
ENGLISH: All countries but Spain are also English words:
FRENCH: What we think of as the past tense (-ed) is in French known as the passé composé, where a past participle for the verb is combined with a form of avoir (to have) or être (to be). The past participle is usually regular, but some aren't! The verbs here all have irregular past participles, except servir.
RUSSIAN: In Russian, "O" takes a long o sound when it is in the stressed syllable. Otherwise, it is takes an "ah" sound. The keyword is the only one which does *not* have the stress on the "O" syllable. The definitions of each word are here
SPANISH: All words are nouns ending in 'e', which is not directly indicative of gender. All words are feminine, except for "Tomate"
MANDARIN: Chinese characters are sorted in traditional dictionaries by a couple different ways, one of which is by number of strokes and then by the type of the first stroke (dot, across, down, and left). The keyword in this set is the only one with a dot as the first stroke (all the others are across, even if there are other dots in the character).
With respect to other characteristics they are a hodgepodge (tone, number of strokes, part of speech, etc). tang1 can also be used as a family name, but so can yuan3. The numbers (eg 1057) indicate their placement in a book on the official list of simplified characters, don't mind them.
tang1 p.345, 16 strokes, dot as first type of stroke, soup/family name
ji1 420, 16 strokes, across as first stroke, machine/mechanism
yuan3 579, 13 strokes, across as first type of stroke, far away/family name
zhi4 1057, 7 strokes, across as first type of stroke, will/volition
cha2 361, 10 strokes, across as first type of stroke, tea
jiu4 356, 18 strokes, across as first type of stroke, old
The five words, once found, are then translated and arranged chronologically in order of the country's revolution. Since languages are used in multiple countries, the picture on the stamp next to each leader indicated a revolutionary leader tied to that country (and sometimes the specific revolution).
| Language | Country | Revolution | Leader | Word |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | US | 1776/07/04 | Benjamin Franklin | Spanish |
| French | France | 1789/07/14 | Napoleon | Serve |
| Russian | Russia | 1917 | Lenin | Chilled |
| Spanish | Cuba | 1959/01/01 | Camilo Cienfuegos | Tomato |
| Mandarin | China | 1966-1976ish | Mao Zedong | Soup |
The phrase "Spanish Serve Chilled Tomato Soup" indicates the answer word, GAZPACHO.
