First Quiz

I finally created my first quiz--Odd Language Out. I had been looking for subject matter for a quiz that made sense to me, and though I found many, most of them already had a quiz very similar to the one I was contemplating making.

So one day I thought of language families--that sounds like a good quiz, right? It's fun to know that there are a lot of Indo-European languages and that Basque is a language isolate and all that good stuff. And it's an excuse to make a first attempt (after taking many, many quizzes) at using the quiz-making tools.

So the first thing I thought of is this: language taxonomy isn't 100% agreed-upon or stable, and the details mostly interest linguists (and certain language extremists who tie their views of language to strange nationalist or ethnocentric ideas--those that think Tamil is the ultimate language progenitor, for example, or who argue endlessly that Serbo-Croatian doesn't exist, etc.). You can really get into the weeds on whether languages are related at one "level" or another: language taxonomy doesn't seem to be as straightforward as phylogenetic taxonomy, and even if it were, phylogenetic taxonomy still changes depending on what system or convention you use or who you talk to.

But it's pretty clear that people and cats are more closely related than either is to a lizard, so even if you argue about whether Aves is a class or something else, that's a fun piece of knowledge to have. So that's why I chose the "odd one out" format and tried to see which of the quiz types would be a good match for it. I wanted the quiz-taker to identify which language of three isn't in the language family or group that are shared by the other two.

Some cool (and by cool, I mean slightly tricky in a way that amuses me) groups immediately occurred to me. For example, Hungarian is really different from languages spoken around it, because it is a Finno-Ugric language (and Uralic) like Finnish, while right next door you have all these Indo-European languages, Slavic, Romance and Germanic. What "fun" it will be to correctly identify Hungarian as the outlier!

Unfortunately, I'm not a linguist so there were only a handful of these "fun" groups that I already knew about, which is fine. I also wanted to include non-European (and non-Indo-European) languages even though I'm much more familiar with them. And probably, so is most of the English Jetpunk crowd. Still, it was fun trying to make similar groups with lesser-known languages while trying to avoid "really impossible" obscure languages. I figured if I guessed that I would get more than 50% if I were taking the quiz cold, that's "easy enough" for general consumption.

I'm not sure I hit that mark, though. Some of the languages are included for representation but there are very few speakers, like the triple Nahuatl, Comanche and Mayan (which I learned was a group of languages, so I chose what I considered the most popular and well-known example, Yucatec Maya, still spoken in the Yucatán). I was trying to "fool" the user into thinking that maybe Maya and Aztec are related because they are both in Mexico, but reward the user who knows how distinct the Maya and Aztec were, in time and custom.

Still, in retrospect, trying to add a "tricky" layer to a quiz where many of the questions reference non-superficial specialist knowledge probably makes it too hard to be fun. Looking at the result, if I had taken it cold without reference to my research for making the quiz, I probably would have scored exactly 50% (whereas I think quizzes are most fun when you score about 70%-80%).

I contemplated breaking the questions up into a quiz 1 (with more obvious, easier groups) and quiz 2 (for more obscure ones) but it was hard enough finding 20 groupings without a lot of repetition and without getting too ridiculously obscure. Only three questions reference languages that don't appear on Official Languages of the World or Top World Languages, so at least I don't think it's "unfair" in terms of obscurity.

Of course, in retrospect, I feel like I've learned something. For one, I should have called Farsi "Persian" to be consistent with common usage and the previous language quizzes (I will probably modify the quiz after collecting more things that should be updated). Secondly, I learned a lot more trivia than I knew about language relationships, so that was fun, and I figured out how to use the quiz tool to make a quiz in a slightly-different format. The only thing that didn't work so well is that each of my "questions" is the same, which looks visually boring--if I could, I'd omit the question text altogether.