Linguistics Olympiad toolkit

verb; adjective; pronoun

HintThree word classes, each spotted by how it behaves rather than by what it means.

The whyA puzzle's word list rarely labels its word classes — you work them out from the English meanings. Find the action words first: once you know which puzzle word is the doing word, its position tells you the language's word order, and everything else — who is doing it, and to whom — settles into place around it. Foundation puzzles very often begin here: match the verbs, then the rest.

A morpheme

Hint'Un-', 'kind' and '-ness' are three of them inside a single word.

The why'Unkindness' has three: 'un-' (not), 'kind' and '-ness' (a state). Puzzle languages work the same way — a root plus bolt-on bits for plural, tense or possession. Spot the bits and you have the grammar.

suffix

HintThe one that is glued on at the end.

The whyPrefix before, root in the middle, suffix after — position is the whole difference. Puzzle languages lean heavily on endings: a single one can mark that a noun is plural, that a verb is in the past, or who owns something. When two puzzle words share a root but differ at the end, the difference is where the grammar is hiding.

Marking the plural

HintEnglish often does the same job with -s or -es on the end.

The whyMany languages add a suffix for 'more than one', just as English usually adds -s. In a puzzle, look for the part that recurs whenever the English meaning is plural, and check it is absent whenever the meaning is singular. Some languages do it differently — Indonesian doubles the word ('orang' person, 'orang-orang' people) — so let the data, not English, tell you.

SOV

HintSame three letters as the English order, in a different arrangement.

The whyEnglish is SVO — 'the cat (S) chased (V) the mouse (O)' — but that is only one of the arrangements languages use. Japanese and Turkish are verb-final (SOV); Welsh and Irish are verb-first (VSO). A Foundation puzzle often turns on noticing that the word matching the English verb keeps landing first or last, so never assume the puzzle language lines up with English.

It agrees with the noun

HintWhich OTHER word changed its ending at the same time — and why would they move together?

The whyIn English an adjective never changes — 'red house', 'red houses' — but in many languages the adjective copies the noun's number (and sometimes its gender) with a matching ending. That is agreement, the same idea as English subject–verb agreement in 'she runs' / 'they run'. Watch the order too: Spanish adjectives usually follow the noun ('casa roja', literally 'house red'), so do not assume 'red' comes first.

possession

HintEnglish shows this with an apostrophe and an s.

The whyOwnership is one of the commonest things a suffix marks, and setters like it because English hides the same idea inside an apostrophe. In most data sets the owner's word gains the ending, not the thing owned — look at which of the two nouns has changed. Some languages do it the other way round — Hungarian puts the ending on the thing owned, and Turkish marks both words — so, as always, check every example before deciding.

The definite article

HintEnglish has exactly one such word, and all it does is point at a particular thing.

The why'The' is the definite article and 'a' / 'an' the indefinite one; with words like 'this' and 'my' they make up the determiners. Not every language has one — Latin and Russian have no word for 'the' at all, so the puzzle simply leaves it out and the translation adds it back. Romanian attaches its 'the' to the end of the noun, so the article may be hiding inside a longer word.

Isolate the piece that changed

HintPut the two words side by side and find what one has which the other lacks.

The whyThis is the whole UKLO method in one line: line up two forms that differ in exactly one way, isolate the piece that changed (here '-at'), name what it does (past tense), then apply it to a new word — so 'I sing' = 'sol' gives 'I sang' = 'solat'. Some English past tenses are irregular ('sang', not 'singed'), but a puzzle language is usually perfectly regular — the setter wants you to find the rule, not to remember exceptions.

Check it against every example

HintA rule that fits two lines can still break on the fifth — and the setter knows it.

The whyUKLO puzzles are built so that a rule which fits the first few examples is often not quite right — the awkward line near the end is there on purpose. Test every example before you write an answer, and when one breaks the rule, refine the rule rather than ignore the line. Round 1 for the Foundation tier is sat in school between 11 and 16 January 2027, and Gold is roughly the top 5%; this habit is what separates a near-miss from a clean solution.

Cognate

HintLiterally 'born together' — think of two cousins who still share the family nose.

The whyCognates are your free clues: if a puzzle language is related to one you know, a word that looks like 'mother', 'three' or 'night' probably means what it seems to. But be careful — a false friend looks familiar and means something else (Spanish 'embarazada' means pregnant, not embarrassed), so treat a lookalike as a hypothesis to check against the data, never as an answer.

The subject

HintIn 'The dog bit the postman', it is the dog — not the unlucky postman.

The whyIn 'the dog bit the postman', the dog is the subject and the postman the object; in 'the postman was bitten', the postman is the subject — it is what the sentence is about, whoever did the biting. Puzzle languages often mark it with an ending rather than by word order, so a sentence can still be perfectly clear even when the words move about. English subject–verb agreement ('the dog bites' / 'the dogs bite') is the same idea in miniature.