Open round | 10 points | 51.26% | Problem statement | Official solution | Tags: Phrase translation
There's no syntactic pattern here, so we just have to find a few keywords. I found: "ankom" = "Ant" (appearing in (1) and (2)); "tärko" = "Small Fish" (appearing in (1) and (3)).
Looking at F1:
Here are the remaining sentences:
(7) It blew down and broke the tree.
(10) But some big fish were trying to kill him.
(11) A catfish was about to swallow him.
(A) Bunkuttang a mäse ngänygäny e dängkamän.
(D) Be ddob kollba ulleulle da gäz e de ada däganeyo.
(E) Llo de duduaibnegnän a dattkaemnegnän.
We need to look for more keywords to match them, preferably concrete nouns and verbs. Here's another with "tree":
(2) Ankom obo ma me daeya llo toko me. Ant was in his house on top of a tree.
Compare with the three sentences above; the only word that repeats is "llo" in (E), so (7) = (E), and "llo" = "tree".
Here's one containing "fish":
(3) Tärko walle me daeya ddob kollba nagnag oba peyang. Small Fish was in the river with some fish friends.
Compare with the remaining two; "ddob kollba" appears in (D), so (10) = (D), and one of "ddob" and "kollba" is "fish". That leaves (11) = (A).
Now we have all the correspondences, we need to look more closely at word-level matching. We don't have to translate each word because the question only asks for a selected few, but it would be nice to get a few more to get a sense of sentence structure.
Here are all sentences. The colors represent different parts of speech: red for subjects, green for objects, blue for verbs, and violet for other parts of speech.
In F2 and F3, we only have 2 left to translate: "yäbäd" and "catfish" (I didn't explicitly say it, but "and" is obviously "a" from "ant and small fish" and "blew down and broke"). "Yäbäd" only appears in 5; "catfish" only appears in 11.
To understand whether "yäbäd" is "clouds" or "sun", we must understand the word order. Unfortunately, there's no fixed word order: in most cases we have the subject first, but in a few cases we have the object first. But here's a critical observation: in "wel ulle da gongkamän" = "a big wind began", we have the particle "da" unaccounted for. Looking around: in sentences 6–12, whenever we have a red phrase, it's always followed by "da" or "a". So this particle is the subject marker. Inspired by this, when we look at all green phrases, they are all followed by "de" or "bom" (in 8, the whole object is "Ant's house" = "Ankom bo ma"). Therefore, because "yäbäd" is followed by "de", it must be the object "clouds". This also means that "sun" is "ddapall käkan". Similarly, in 11, "bunkuttang" is followed by "a", so it must be the subject "catfish".
Finally, I think F4 is pretty difficult. We already know that "tärko" = "small fish", "kollba" = "fish", "llo" = "tree", "ulleulle" = "big", "wel" = "wind", so none of these words can be in the translation for "Ant got on top of his house.". We also know that "ankom" = "ant" and sort of that "obo ma" = "his house" (based on 2 and 8). That leaves two of "toko", "towall", "me", "we" as "on top of". We have only a few sentences containing these words:
Ankom obo ma me daeya llo toko me.
Ant was in his house on top of a tree.
Tärko walle me daeya ddob kollba nagnag oba peyang.
Small Fish was in the river with some fish friends.
Ttongo ag me däbe ttängäm a säresäremang gogon.
One morning that place was about to rain.
Ankom bo ma de wel a dapisamän a ankom bom daspunän walle we.
The wind tore Ant's house and threw Ant into the river.
Tärko da mängalae källa
gokätaemän a ine peyang
ankom bom towall toko we
daspunän a ttam
gogän.
Small Fish quickly
splashed with his tail, and with
water threw
Ant on top of the grass, and he
was saved.
Ankom obo ma me daeya llo toko me.
Ant was in his house on top of a tree.
Tärko da mängalae källa
gokätaemän a ine peyang
ankom bom towall toko we
daspunän a ttam
gogän.
Small Fish quickly
splashed with his tail, and with
water threw
Ant on top of the grass, and he
was saved.
Tärko da mängalae källa
gokätaemän a ine peyang
ankom bom towall toko we
daspunän a ttam
gogän.
Small Fish quickly
splashed with his tail, and with
water threw
Ant on top of the grass, and he
was saved.
The two occurrences of "on top of" both use "toko", so "toko" should be in the translation. "me" and "we" seem to be prepositions. I wouldn't have got this, but both cases of "we" are combined with "threw", so it expresses a dynamic change of location, while "me" is used in a static location. Here "got on" is a dynamic change, so we should use "toko we". If "toko we" is "onto top of", then that leaves "towall" in 12 as "grass".