Linguistics Olympiad Draws Multi-Talented Youngsters

Don't look for questions in anything as mundane as French,
Spanish or Mandarin at the International Linguistics Olympiad this
week at Carnegie Mellon University.

Organizers of the competition prefer their puzzlers in rarefied
scripts including Japanese braille, Kazakh, Yoda speak (for the Star
Wars character's unique chatter) and button talk, a made-up language
that uses a series of four buttons to represent alphabetical
characters.

"It's fun. You can, without any previous knowledge of a language,
solve a problem," said Canadian national team member William Zehang,
17, of Vancouver, British Columbia.

This is the first time the 9-year-old competition, which is
bringing to Pittsburgh 100 high school students on teams from 19
countries, has taken place in the United States.

Organizers hope it will engage high school students in areas of
computer science included in computational linguistics such as
search engine technology, speech recognition and speech translation.

But the Olympiad is strictly low-tech. Competitors playing on
four-member teams and individual matches solve the problems with
paper and pencil.

So much the better if a puzzle in ancient Greek is "all Greek" to
them. Competitors demonstrate their linguistic prowess and
analytical skills by solving the logic puzzles based on patterns
they tease out of writing systems, grammar and sequences.

For good measure, the authors sometimes throw in a falsehood the
competitors also must solve.

Kaitlyn Price, a junior at Oberlin College who is interning at
CMU this summer, remembers the first time a teacher at Shaler Area
High School handed her a sample problem when she was 15. …

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