UKLO 2018

Marking person and number

HintOne row per speaker in the table: I, you, he — then the same again for groups.

The whyEnglish has almost lost this: only 'she sings' keeps an ending. Many languages put 'I', 'we' or 'you' on the verb itself, so a Foundation puzzle often opens with a little verb table. Build the table first — one row per person, singular and plural — and the pronouns, if there are any, fall out on their own. The 2018 paper gave one point per correct word, so a wrong ending cost as much as a wrong word.

formal

HintCompare the lines spoken to a friend with the lines spoken to a teacher.

The whyFrench 'tu' / 'vous' and Russian 'ty' / 'vy' use the polite word for the plural as well; German ('Sie' beside 'ihr') and Spanish ('usted' beside 'vosotros') keep a separate plural. A puzzle that tells you who is speaking to whom is telling you which 'you' to pick — and the two forms usually take different verb endings, so check those too.

subject; question; dual

HintLook for what is missing from the puzzle column, what is added only in the lines that ask something, and what has three forms rather than two.

The whyEach of the three is a signal to look for in the data. If an English 'I' or 'we' keeps matching nothing, it is hidden in the verb. If a tiny word appears only in lines that end with a question mark, that is the marker. And if some words come in three forms rather than two, the middle one is likely the dual — 'the two of us', 'you two'.

VSO

HintFind which puzzle word matches the English verb, then note what follows it.

The whyRoughly one language in ten begins the sentence with the verb. In a puzzle this shows up as the word matching the English verb always landing first, with the doer somewhere after it — sometimes right at the end. Once you spot it, stop reading the first word as the subject; work out which word is the verb, then place the others around it.

Decode letters from known names

HintOne word you can already read is worth more than the whole sign.

The whyInternational words sound much the same everywhere — 'hotel', 'taxi', 'pizza' — so each one hands you several letter values at once. Write the word you know under its foreign spelling, pair the letters, then hunt for those letters elsewhere on the sign. Each new letter unlocks a new word, and each new word confirms a letter.

Transliteration

HintNot turning the meaning into English — just swapping the script.

The why'Moskva' for Москва is transliteration; 'Moscow' is simply the English name for it. Puzzles about unfamiliar alphabets ask for the first, so keep the sounds and swap the letters. One foreign letter may need two of ours (sh, ts), and one of ours may need two of theirs.

digraph

HintOne sound, written with a pair of letters — the way 'ch' and 'th' are.

The why'sh', 'ch', 'th' and 'ng' are the common English ones. Other alphabets often have a single letter for those sounds, so when you transliterate, expect one of their letters to come out as two of ours — and be ready for the reverse, where our single 'x' is their two letters. Count sounds, not letters, and the spellings line up.

A classifier

HintEnglish needs a different measure word for bread and for tea — this language needs a different 'my'.

The whyClassifiers group nouns by what they are or how they are used. Some languages choose one by shape (long, flat, round); others, as here, by how the owner relates to the thing — food, drink or property. Whenever a puzzle gives several forms of one small word for no obvious grammatical reason, ask what the nouns have in common: the answer is usually a category of meaning, not of form.

By a possessive suffix

HintNot a separate word like English 'my' — look at what got added to the noun.

The whyMany languages hang 'my', 'your', 'his' on the end of the noun as an ending. Body parts and family members are the commonest nouns to take them directly, because those things are always somebody's. Build a small table of the endings — one per person — and check it against every line before translating.

absence

HintCompare what the two forms have — and what one of them lacks.

The whyNothing can be a signal. If one small word turns up before every noun that means one thing and vanishes before every noun that means several, that word is doing double duty: it says which thing, and it says how many. Setters like this because English speakers expect an ending for plurals and never think to look for a missing word.

Exclusive we

HintPicture the speaker pointing at their own group with the listener standing outside the circle.

The whyInclusive 'we' counts the person you are talking to; exclusive 'we' leaves them out. English has one word for both, so the puzzle's English column tells you which is which — read the brackets.

The imperative

HintLook for the lines whose English ends with an exclamation mark.

The whyIn many languages the command form is the bare verb stem with no ending, which makes it a handy way to find the stem itself. Spot the line with the exclamation mark in the English column and you have isolated the root every other form is built on.