Linguistic Problems on Number Names

This paper presents a contrastive investigation of linguistic problems based on number names in different languages and intended for secondary-school students. We examine the eight problems of this type that have been assigned at the International Linguistics Olympiad throughout the years and compare the phenomena in the number systems featured there with those of the working languages of the Olympiad and other languages known to be familiar to the participants. On the basis of a statistical analysis of the results achieved by the contestants we draw conclusions regarding the ways in which the difficulty of a problem depends on its structure and the kinds of linguistic phenomena featured in it.