Every card in UKLO 2015

Grammatical gender

HintFrench 'le' and 'la' sort nouns this way.

WhyGrammatical gender assigns each noun a class — masculine, feminine, sometimes neuter — that other words then copy. French 'la table' is feminine for no reason of biology. In a puzzle, when the verb or the article has two forms and the split does not follow singular/plural or meaning, gender is the likely explanation.

The subject's gender

HintSort the subjects by which verb form they take, then look at the two groups.

WhyRussian past-tense verbs agree with the gender of the subject: a masculine subject takes one ending, a feminine one another, and so does any noun the language files as feminine. That is why 'the cow' and 'Anna' pattern together. Find the two verb forms, sort the subjects by which form they take, and the classes appear.

th

HintLook at how 'ye olde' shop signs came about.

Why'þ' (thorn) spelt the sound of 'the' and 'thin'; early printers had no thorn and used 'y' instead, which is why 'ye olde' is really 'the old'. Old spellings often pack one sound into a single letter where we use two, so an old word can look shorter than its modern spelling.

It is ambiguous

HintAsk what, apart from word order, could tell the two roles apart here — and whether there is anything.

WhyCase-marking languages can afford free word order only because the endings say who did what. When two nouns happen to share one form for both roles, nothing is left to decide, and the sentence genuinely means either thing. A puzzle may ask you to explain exactly why such a sentence is unclear — name the two readings.

Speech sounds, not letters

Hint'Though' is not as long as it looks.

WhyAn alphabet designed for a language usually gives one sign per sound, so a name like 'Thomas' has six letters but five sounds and will be five signs long. English spelling is a poor guide: 'th' is one sound, silent letters are none. Say the name, count what you hear, then compare lengths.

The subject's number

Hint'was' and 'were' still do it today — look at what chooses between them.

WhyModern English keeps past-tense agreement only in 'was' / 'were'; older English changed every past-tense verb for a plural subject. Check how many are doing the action before anything else.

A digraph

HintGeorgian and Arabic write 'kh' and 'sh' with one sign.

WhyEnglish uses digraphs because it has around 44 sounds and 26 letters. A script with a letter for every sound will use ONE sign where English writes 'sh', 'ch', 'th' or 'kh' — so when a foreign spelling seems a letter short, a digraph is usually the reason.

dual

HintSingular, plural — and the number in between that English lost.

WhyThe English of a thousand years ago had dual pronouns for 'we two' and 'you two'; some languages still do. Puzzle translations will say 'we two' or 'you all' — those words are the setter flagging a dual, so keep the forms apart.

singular

HintThink whom Juliet addresses as 'thou'.

WhyThou/thee/thy were for one familiar person; ye/you for more than one, or for respect. English later dropped 'thou' and kept 'you' for everything, which is why our translations of other languages need brackets like 'you (plural)'.

3

HintMore than French, fewer than Swahili's noun classes.

WhyGerman: masculine, feminine, neuter. French and Spanish have two; English has none in its nouns, only in 'he / she / it'. Some languages go far beyond three with noun classes marked by prefixes. In a puzzle, the number of gender classes equals the number of different agreement patterns you find.

they

HintThe pronoun that replaced Old English 'hie'.

WhyDanish and Norwegian settlers lived alongside the English for centuries, and the everyday words they left behind — 'sky', 'egg', 'knife', 'they', 'them' — are Norse. The names of the weekdays are older: Tiw, Woden, Thunor and Frig were the Anglo-Saxons' own gods, cousins of the Norse Tyr, Odin, Thor and Frigg. So a Norse name in an old script may look a little different from the English weekday that honours its counterpart.

Saxons; Norse; French

HintThree arrivals: Germanic tribes, then Vikings, then the conquerors of 1066.

WhyThat layered history is why English has 'kingly' (Germanic), 'royal' (French) and 'regal' (Latin) for one idea, and why the oldest English looks like a foreign language. The English of a thousand years ago had case endings and freer word order — features that survive in German and that puzzles on early English rely on.