Hello readers! I’m Liam
McKnight from the UK, and I’ve taken part in the International Linguistics
Olympiad (IOL) for the past three years.
In this post, I’ll share some of the
ways I’ve found useful for preparing for a linguistics olympiad at any level, which
hopefully will, in turn, be useful to you!
Linguistics Olympiads don’t
require any knowledge of linguistic theory, nor are they about how many
languages or know, or how well you know them. Most of the time, you’ll be given
data such as phrases or sentences in a language you don’t know and probably have
never heard of, and then you’ll be asked to translate more sentences using that
data, or to explain some feature or structure in the language. Other types of
questions include working out the number system in a different language or
decoding an orthography which could work entirely differently to your own
language’s writing system.
1. Practice
Generally, participants who do
well are those who have either participated in olympiads before or have
practiced different questions from previous Olympiads. That’s not to say you
can’t do well without prior experience - it’s more than knowing what types of
questions can come up, as well as how languages tend to “work,” can be really
useful.
Some linguistics problems may
also require you to write a formal explanation of how the grammar of the
language in the question works - in these cases, it’s (almost) never necessary
to write down how you actually worked out your conclusions, but you will need
to lay out clearly and concisely a set of rules which should allow you to
explain any of the sentences or phrases in the question. Even if you’re not
required to submit an explanation, writing down the structure you’ve worked out
in rough can be a helpful way of working out any more translations you need to
do or catching any mistakes you’ve made.
2. Keeping an Open Mind
The way your native language
(or languages) structure themselves and view the world is not necessarily the
same as the way any other language works - in linguistics problems, it’s very
likely that some aspect or aspects will be entirely different. For example,
some languages require that each time you state something, you must also state
how you know it - whether it’s something you’ve seen yourself, or heard from
someone else, or only inferred from evidence (this is known as evidentiality).
Other languages distinguish different types of possession - whether it’s an
“inalienable” possession, like a part of the body, or an “alienable” object
that you own, like a car. When solving questions, try to consider all the
different information that a phrase or sentence might encode, and then make
sure you include it all in your answers.
3. How Languages Work
This ties into both points
above - with practice, you’ll be able to recognize roughly what kinds of
features languages are likely to have. For example, this might be things like
which bases are more common than others in number questions (5, 10, 12 and 20
are more common; bases like 7 and 13 are unheard of). This can be done through
practice or through reading about linguistics generally - no knowledge of
linguistics is ever required, but knowing about certain features or terminology
can help you organize your thoughts more clearly. There’s a great list of
resources for this at http://www.uklo.org/for-competitors, and WALS (World
Atlas of Language Structures) is a database of language features found at
http://wals.info/.
However, more important than
all this is that you just have a go at some questions! Even just trying two or
three questions to get an idea of what the competition involves will be a huge
advantage.
Other Resources:
 |
| Team UK at IOL 2016: Samuel, Liam, and Isobel |
IOL website with past problems
(very hard): www.ioling.org
The IOL website also has links to every country’s national Olympiad if you want to try some in different languages.
National Olympiads:
http://www.uklo.org/ (UK); http://nacloweb.org/ (North America); http://plo-in.org/ (India); https://ailo.adaptcentre.ie/ (Ireland)
Tips
for linguistics problems by UK competitor Ellie Warner that go into a lot
more detail (the last three are more specific to IOL)
About the Author
Liam McKnight is from Magdalene
College School, Oxford. Here's a history Liam's participation in IOL: Blageovgrad
2015 (6th position, Gold), Mysore 2016 (3rd position, Gold), Dublin 2017 (3rd
position, Gold).
Science Olympiad Blog is proudly sponsored by Adroit Education - a Boutique College Consulting Firm that aides the gifted STEM Students to become the Next-Generation Researchers, Scholars, and Innovators by attending the finest American Universities.
