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Dr. Shapiro's Puzzle of the Day

Today's Puzzle

Wednesday, March 10
M I L D not picante ill-formed
_ _ _ _ pickling herb ill-formed
_ _ _ _ _ copycat ill-formed
_ _ _ _ _ polite ill-formed
_ _ _ _ _ pale, perhaps with rage ill-formed
_ _ _ _ _   lifelike, or evoking strong images   ill-formed
_ _ _ word from a recipe well-formed

   


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Yesterday's Puzzle + Solution

Today's puzzle is linguistic. (This one will probably take a little longer than the average PotD. I hope you enjoy it!)

I sorted my daughter's alphabet blocks into two groups. Can you figure out what's special about the group on the right? You'll want to use the Hebrew alphabet chart below—and note that Hebrew reads from right to left.

Further Hints Vowels are not written in Hebrew (although vav and yod can make "u" and "i" sounds).

The lamed on the blocks looks a little different from the one in the chart.

BONUS: Among the blocks in the group on the right, the camel stands apart, linguistically speaking. How so?

Solution If you sound out the Hebrew names, you'll find that the animals on the right all sound similar to their English names; they are cognates. For example, the zebra reads as ZBRH. (Remember that vowels aren't written. The H is silent, but needed to make a vowel sound at the end of a word. This is related to why Biblical names of people and places often have silent H's!)

Now, it's not an accident that the panda, penguin, zebra, etc. have Hebrew names that are cognate to the English. None of those animals would have been familiar to ancient Hebrew speakers, and by the time news of them spread around the world, Hebrew was mostly a frozen language, used for liturgical purposes. When Hebrew was revived as a living language beginning in the 19th century, it needed a lot of new words to talk about modern things, and these were mostly borrowed from other languages.

But camels are not exactly a novelty in the Middle East, right? "Camel" is different from the others because English got it from Hebrew or another Semitic language (through a long chain of intermediaries), rather than the other way around. This might explain something a couple of you noticed, which is that "camel" and the Hebrew root GML are a little less alike than the other cognate pairs. They've had more time to drift apart.

(Note: "Giraffe" also entered English from a Semitic language, namely Arabic, but it's not a Semitic word; its original source is unknown.)

Congratulations to yesterday's winners Jacob C.🐪, Yana, Charlie, and Shelly. Thanks to everybody who made a guess!

About This Site

Though he now teaches mathematics, Dr. (né Mr.) Shapiro's first job in a K–12 school was as a lunch monitor in Davis, CA. It was there that he originated the Puzzle of the Day, even rewarding correct answers with tickets in denominations like "15 points" (though without a clear idea of how he'd ultimately redeem these). Dr. Shapiro's favorite puzzle from this pre-professional era was "Tell me the location of the beehive on this campus."

Ten years later, Dr. Shapiro revived Puzzle of the Day at Proof School, writing each day's puzzle on a name tag. After 600 puzzles or so, he was just starting to feel normal about students reading his chest all the time when campus closed and the puzzle, like the rest of our lives, moved online. New puzzles are posted daily on school days.

Want to catch up on old PotDs? There's an archive currently containing puzzles from March to December 2020.