27
Bo r l a s i a n 2 0 1 3
In School
Linguistics Olympiad
Advanced Paper
We returned to take on the annual Linguistics Olympiad
for the second year in 2013 with a larger and much
stronger team than before, with students from year 10
right through to year 13 taking on the advanced paper. We
knew it would be challenging as it had been very tough
for those of us who were the guinea pigs last year trying it
out for the first time, and this year the paper really pushed
us to consider foreign languages and solve problems
unlike any we had come across before. Questions this year
ranged from Bengali to ancient Phoenician to perhaps the
hardest language of them all: English. Believe it or not,
trying to make head or tail of such a complex language as
our own, without having learned it based on patterns and
verb endings, turned out to be perhaps the most difficult
thing we did during the two hours of the paper. We had
to come up with a rule for when
is
can be shortened to
‘s
after a noun or pronoun, and although it’s a fairly basic
idea, in practice writing a rule for it is harder than it may
seem. See? What I love about languages above all is the
insight and alternative angle learning them can give us
on our own native language, and this year’s Linguistics
Olympiad really helped us to do so by inviting us to think
about what we take for granted as being so simple, not to
mention helping us to understand why foreigners learning
the language have such a hard time of it.
We came out of it with most of those taking part earning
a bronze or silver award, which a great improvement on
last year, especially with success from students as young as
year 10 in what is supposedly a 6
th
form challenge. Special
congratulations to Annie Lennon and Christopher Turner
who earned gold awards in the advanced challenge, a
fantastic achievement.
Liam Thorpe Y12
Linguistics Olympiad
Foundation
We, Anna Jones, Isabella O’Hara and Rosie March recently
took part in the UK Linguistics Olympiad. We each found
aspects of the challengedifficult, however someweremore
simple. Each section of the paper focused on a different
language, some common but some relatively unknown,
such as Yoda-speak, from Star Wars! We decided to do the
paper backwards as the questions nearer to the end had a
higher difficulty rating, therefore gave us more marks. We
found working in a group very beneficial as we each had
different strengths and weaknesses which meant that we
could split the questions between the three of us. Whilst
Anna chose to focus on Arabic, Bella attempted working
out The Shavian Alphabet and Rosie completed all of the
other tasks, such as translating Pali to English. The UKLO
paper required the use of phonics (which Bella had much
familiarity with) and working out problems logically.
Although we found the paper challenging, we really
enjoyed expanding our knowledge of different languages.
It was a great feeling accomplishment whenwe completed
the paper and had been successful in achieving the highest
mark within our category at Borlase.
The UK Linguistics Olympiad was a fantastic experience
and we would really encourage others to get involved
with the competition in years to come.
To find out more about the UK Linguistics Olympiad visit:
Note fromMrs Hopper
Anna, Isabella and Rosie were our top performing team in the Foundation competition. Well done! We have high
hopes for them as they progress through to the intermediate and higher competitions. The school’s results this
year in both Intermediate and Advanced level were really encouraging, too, with 2 gold medals, 3 silver and 9
bronze medals, and some fantastic efforts, too, from some year 10 and 11 pupils who competed at national level
with year 13s from other schools. Follow the web link above and see how well you get on with the code breaking
in which our pupils succeeded. It’s not as easy as it might seem!
