Humans Who Read Grammars

On Monday the International Linguistics Olympiad starts in Blagoevgrad in Bulgaria. 44 teams of secondary school students from 29 countries will compete in solving linguistic puzzles. They will compete in 18 different languages, you can read more about those here.  The olympiad is about solving linguistic puzzles based on the languages of the world (it is not a test of competence in different languages, just like linguistics is not the science of knowing the most languages ). We want to wish all participants all the best, good luck everyone! If you're wondering anything about languages or linguistics, feel free to ask us Humans for advice ! Linguistics is a great discipline, it's great to see so many enthusiastic young people from all over the world get together to celebrate it. I hope they all have tons of fun and learn loads :)! If you want to follow the IOL around on the internets, check out this post for different ways of doing that  and keep an eye out for #io...

(Re-blogging from the blog of the IOL (International Linguistics Olympiad ), with added gifs ^^! The IOL is a contest for secondary school students in linguistics, read more here .) All the problems from the 12th International Linguistics Olympiad that took place in Beijing this July 2014 are now up on the official IOL-website ! The problem set is multilingual, as it has been since the start in 2003. This year we have 16 different languages: Bulgarian Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, Hungarian, Japanese, Latvian, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Ukrainian. We are, as always, extremely grateful to and impressed by  the Problem Committee and the Jury. The problems are not written wholly in one language, but in a kind of “solverese”. If you want to read more about how that works, read this: Derzhanski, Ivan (2013) Multilingual Editing of Linguistic Problems, In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Teaching NLP and...