Students Face Tough Language Puzzles

Four sixth form students will test their problem solving skills against young linguists from around the world in July.

Daniel Quayle, Annie Lennon, Max Quayle and Dylan Leonine will represent the Isle of Man at the International Linguistics Olympiad in Bulgaria, where over 150 competitors from up to 30 countries will test themselves against the world’s toughest language puzzles.

The four were selected after achieving the highest scores in the Isle of Man’s regional competition.

A total of 42 students from the Isle of Man’s secondary schools attempted the competition paper, which was devised by Max Wheeler, professor emeritus of linguistics at Sussex University.

The contest aims to inspire young linguists and language students to develop their analytical skills and encourage them to find out more about language structure and grammatical concepts.

The mind-bending paper tested students on a range of linguistic systems and expected them to analyse the pronouns and cases in an Australian Aboriginal language and even calculate semantic relationships in an artificial language devised by a computer algorithm.