Every card in UKLO 2020

A syllable

HintCount the beats in the word, then count the signs.

WhySpelled with letters, a word would usually need more letters than it has syllables; two or three signs for two or three syllables means each sign is carrying a consonant-plus-vowel chunk. A script built that way is a syllabary. Make this observation before you try to match anything — it tells you what kind of script you are dealing with.

Mutually intelligible

HintLook at how much of each other's sentences the two sets of speakers could follow.

WhySpanish and Portuguese speakers can often follow each other; so can Czechs and Slovaks. The line between a dialect and a language is partly political. In a puzzle built on such a pair, the two columns will look almost the same — which is exactly why the puzzle asks you to tell them apart.

A safe starting pair

HintThe odd one out by length pairs with the odd one out by length.

WhyBefore you know a single sign, you can compare shapes: which words are longest, which share an ending, which is another plus one sign. Match those shapes across the two columns and you get your first sign values without guessing. The longest word in each column is another near-certain pairing.

A person ending

HintCompare 'I sing' and 'she sings' in the English column, then in the puzzle column.

WhySome languages of northern Europe work like this: the verb never changes for who is doing it. English almost matches ('I sing', 'we sing') but keeps '-s' for he and she. When a puzzle language shows the same verb form line after line, take it as settled and spend your effort on the words that do change.

Small systematic differences

HintThe everyday words no language borrows: 'not', 'and', 'the'.

WhyClosely related languages differ in a few predictable spots: the word for 'not' (Spanish 'no', Portuguese 'não'), the word for 'this', a favourite ending, a spelling habit for one vowel. Find one such marker in the examples and you can label every sentence in seconds. It is the same skill as telling British from American spelling by 'colour' and 'color'.

diacritics

HintThe umlaut in 'Zürich' and the accent in 'café' are both examples.

WhyIn many languages an accented vowel is a different letter, so a word with the wrong mark is a different word — or nonsense. When a puzzle says 'the accents matter', it means it: the 2020 paper's scheme expected them. Copy every mark exactly, and when two words differ only by a mark, treat that as a real difference to explain.

suffix

HintCompare the two forms letter by letter.

WhySeveral European languages put 'the' on the end of the noun. In a puzzle this looks like a noun that sometimes has an extra ending for no reason — until you notice that every such line translates with 'the' and every bare form with 'a'. Once seen, it also tells you the noun's gender if the ending has more than one form.

after

Hint'I sing not' — as Shakespeare would have said it.

WhyEnglish 'I do not sing' puts the negative in front of the main verb; a language may say 'I sing not', as English itself once did. Find the line with 'not' in the English column, locate the puzzle word that appears only there, and note which side of the verb it sits on — then keep it on that side in your own translations.

A long vowel or a final consonant

HintCompare 'bee' with 'bet' and 'bit' — two of them carry more.

WhyA syllable is heavy when it has more in it than a short vowel: either the vowel is long, or a consonant closes the syllable. Many languages let only heavy syllables carry stress, and some always stress the last heavy one. A puzzle that marks vowel length and stress side by side is inviting you to compare the two.

The stressed syllable

HintIn 'BAnana' versus 'baNAna', it is the one in capitals.

WhyEnglish 'REcord' (noun) and 'reCORD' (verb) differ only in it. Some languages fix it by rule — always first, always second-to-last, always the last heavy one — and a puzzle can ask you to find that rule.

pronoun; deleted; order

HintWhere the doer is marked, what happens when vowels collide, and why you cannot apply the tidy-ups all at once.

WhyA language that builds 'you-work', 'she-works', 'they-work' by adding a piece at the front will also have to tidy up the join — two vowels bumping together usually lose one. When a puzzle has more than one such tidy-up rule, try them in different sequences on a known word: only one sequence reproduces the data.

root

HintStrip off every bolt-on piece and this is what is left.

WhyFind the root first and everything else becomes an affix to label. In a verb table, the root is the piece that stays constant down the column while the prefixes or endings change across the row. Sound rules can disguise it — a root beginning with a vowel may lose that vowel after a prefix — so compare several forms before deciding where it starts.