There are thousands of languages ​​in the country

In the last days of July, the XIV International Linguistics Olympiad for schoolchildren was held in the Indian city of Masur. At the Olympics, Russia was represented by eight high school students selected among the winners of the XLVI of the traditional Linguistics Olympiad. Russian schoolchildren went around all their rivals in the number of gold medals and according to the total number of awards.

For the first time in the history of the Olympiad, all eight participants from one country returned home with medals. The gold was won by Ivan Samodelkin and Polina Silyskov from Moscow and Ekaterina Voloshinov from St. Petersburg, silver medals went to Muscovites Anna Tatarenko, Yulia Panchenko and Maria Aristova, and the Petersburger Daniil Vedeneev and Elena Shukshina from Perm received bronze. In total, 10 gold, 17 silver and 26 bronze medals were played in the individual championship. In addition to Russians, representatives of South Korea, Great Britain, the USA, the Czech Republic, Australia and Bulgaria took the award. The absolute winner of the Olympiad was the Korean schoolboy Chen Yang, who scored 92 points out of 100 possible. In the team round, Russian schoolchildren took sixth place. The Swedes went to gold medals, silver medals to the Australians, and bronze - a team from the UK.

The words "Olympiad in linguistics for schoolchildren" are mysterious for many, because the school does not have the subject "linguistics", in contrast to mathematics, chemistry or literature. Often linguistics is mistakenly called the study of foreign languages. If it were true, the International Olympiad in Linguistics would not exist, because its participants are native speakers of various languages.

In fact, linguistics, or linguistics, is the study of the structure and laws of language in general. Different sections of linguistics are devoted to various language aspects: phonetics studies sound features, morphology - grammatical categories, syntax - the structure of sentence, semantics - meanings and meanings, historical linguistics - the past of languages ​​and the genealogical connections between them ...

So far, we do not know exactly what is happening in a person in the brain at the time of speech, so all linguists, regardless of the field of their interests, work with language material: oral and written texts. The task of the scientist is to analyze the linguistic material and understand how any fragment of the language works. This work of a real linguist is modeling the Olympiad tasks. The only difference is that the phenomenon presented in the task is already open and described by someone, and the material is selected so that the schoolchildren could repeat the path of the scientist and make their small scientific discovery on their own. All tasks are self -sufficient, that is, to solve them, one does not need to have special knowledge, but only by logic and common sense.

The individual tour of the International Linguistics Olympiad lasts six hours, during which time participants are invited to solve five problems. The tasks of this year were distinguished by the enviable variety of phenomena shown in them, as well as the presented language families and geographical areas.

The first task was devoted to the spatial orientation in the Aralle-Tabulakhan language, which speaks of the inhabitants of the small mountain district on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. In this language, one cannot say “I go to such a village” without adding one of the special words characterizing the location of the destination on the ground. Linguists would call these words "spatial markers." Participants in the Olympiad had to determine the rules for choosing one or another spatial marker, using the attached card.

The second task showed schoolchildren, perhaps the most exciting and romantic side of the linguist’s profession: they were lucky to decipher the hieroglyphs - the Luvian letter used in the Hittite kingdom (Maly Asia) in the X - VIII centuries BC. e. According to the rules of the Luvian hieroglyphics, each word could be written in different ways: by meaning, by sound or mixed way.

The third task is the traditional “bilingual”: participants are given proposals in an unfamiliar language with translation and control phrases that need to be translated in both directions. Such tasks imitate the work of a field linguist. Indeed, in order to correctly fulfill the task, the student must analyze the phrases given to him and draw up a small dictionary and, most importantly, the set of rules according to which statements are built in the language that is previously unfamiliar to him.

The language for the study this time was the Kunuz Nubian, which speaks about 50 thousand people in Egypt, and the phrases were literally “crammed” with grammar: the number and case of nouns, time, face and number of verbs, as well as intricate phonetic changes inside the word at the junction of different grammatical indicators.

The fourth task was dedicated to the vocabulary of the Papuan language of Yatmul, which pretty changed after the contact of the people of the Yatmul with Western civilization. So, before the arrival of Europeans, local residents bred pigs, so the imported cow was called the "pig of the White Man." Try to guess what is called in this language a "spear of the White Man" and "the water of the White Man"?

Finally, in the fifth task, the participants of the Olympiad encountered numerous case and prey suffixes of the Hakaru (Peru) language, which, when joining the root, either lose or retain vowel. By the way, the hacar has less than a thousand native speakers. Pubulable languages ​​are often used for the tasks of the linguistic Olympiad, because this is one of the ways to draw attention to them and keep the language at least in the recordings and works of linguists.

An equally interesting test was waiting for the participants in the Olympiad at the team of the tour, where schoolchildren are combined into teams of four people and should solve only one but very difficult and voluminous problem in four hours. This year, for the first time in 11 years, the teams had to work with a sounding speech. The task was to compare more than a hundred short audio recordings in the South African language with their transcription.

The language of the Taa (here it is better known as Khong) is famous for its “clicks” - clicking sounds resembling a horse’s cloth or smoking with a kiss. In combination with conventional consonants, clicks give more than 80 new sounds, which is not easy to distinguish with an untrained ear. The vowel system is also not easy: it differs in gluttalized, nasal, sealing, long and short vowels, as well as four tones.

The team round took place in the rooms of the Olympics in three neighboring buildings, and the sounds of the tongue of Taa rushed from all open windows. Inexperienced random passers -by, they resembled moans, mooing a cow or screams of monkeys - how to distinguish a hundred different words here? However, the Swedish team deciphered half, and 98 words out of 114 were solved by the joint efforts of the first ten teams.

In his free time to solve problems, schoolchildren went on an excursion to the Hindu Church of Chennakeva and to the Shivanasamudra waterfall, studied traditional Indian dances and played in the common table games in India. Meanwhile, their work was checked by the international jury - 20 people from 10 countries under the leadership of the Russian linguist Boris Iomdin.

A necessary condition for working in the jury of the International Olympiad in Linguistics is knowledge of several foreign languages. After all, each participant receives tasks in his native language and writes a decision on it. Unlike most other Olympiads, linguistics tasks are too difficult to solve if their conditions are written in a foreign language: on it, a schoolboy may not see subtle semantic differences that make up the essence of the task.

This year, the assigned commission of the Olympiad prepared tasks in 18 languages: English, Bengal, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Spanish, Chinese, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian version), Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Czech, Swedish, Estonian and Japanese. The coordination of the actions of numerous translators and the editing of options was engaged in the Associate Professor of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Polyglot Ivan Derzhansky.

When checking the work, the jury traditionally divides into groups of 3-5 people, each group takes on one task. Each work is checked independently by three jury members according to pre -developed criteria and then is necessarily discussed by everyone together. In a moment, checking their task, all the jury members help colleagues translation of the work of schoolchildren from a language that they know well. The results of the Olympics are summed up anonymously. Only after the distribution of medals and commendable letters to all members of the jury open the surnames of the winners and winners, and they can be happy or transpracted by their “favorites”, if any.

India is the most suitable place for the International Linguistics Olympiad. According to the 2001 census, in this country with a population of more than a billion people there are 1635 languages, of which 22 are recognized as official languages ​​of the States. In addition, one of the two state languages ​​of India is English. Also, the country to this day uses more than two dozen writing.

One of the jury members, Alexander Pipersky from Moscow, decided on a big experiment to check the official numbers. The European appearance seems unusual Indians, therefore, Alexander walking in tourist places was often asked to take a picture as a keepsake. Posing to photographers, Alexander met them and invariably asked what their native language is.

For three days, excursions on the state of Karnatak in a piggy bank with a meticulous linguist gathered nine languages: the local language of Cannada, as well as Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Marathi, Telugu, Malayam, Bengal and even Tibetan (in the Buddhist monastery). Surprisingly, the languages ​​have never repeated. So, in the unusual multilinguality of India, any participant in the Olympics could be convinced in practice.

Try to solve

As an example, we give one of the Olympiad tasks. Its author is Taehun from South Korea.

Task No. 2 (20 points). Given words in the Luvian language recorded by Latin, and their Russian translations:

1. Runtiyas - deer
2. Patis - leg
3. Harnisas - fortress
4. iziyanta - (they) made
5. Turpis - bread
6. Tarhunzas - thunder
7. Hawis - sheep
8. Sanawas is good
9. Nimuwizas - son
10. Zitis is a man
11. piyanti - (they) give
12. Hantawatis - King
13. Istaris - hand

All the above words can be written differently by the Luvian hieroglyphs.

Below, in a confused order, each word is written in two possible ways (Fig. 1):

(a) correlate each Luvian word recorded by Latin, with two options for its hieroglyphic recording. Indicate the conformity as follows: "Number ~ two letters."

(b) For two of the above 13 words, one more spelling is given:

Determine what these words are.

(c) Briefly explain all the possible functions of the following Luvian signs:

The Luvian language belongs to the Indo -European family. It was spoke in Asia Minor about 3000 years ago.

PS The task, invented by Xenia, received a prize of decisive sympathy, he went to her for the fourth time. Congratulations!