Pullman student helps bring linguistics event to WSU

For students on the Palouse, Washington State University is offering a one-day linguistics competition.

Nancy Bell, the English as a Second Language coordinator in the WSU Department of English, said the idea to have the competition locally came from Pullman High School junior Georgia Colvig.

Colvig reached out to Bell asking if WSU could be a site for the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition. Colvig was interested in participating, but without a site in Pullman, she would have to organize a trip to Seattle to participate at the University of Washington campus. Bell took an interest immediately and went about getting it set up.

“I emailed her and she was awesome and emailed me back,” Colvig said.

The competition is scheduled to start at 9 a.m. Thursday in the Bundy Reading Room at Avery Hall on the Pullman campus. The event will last three hours and students can sign up that day to participate. Participation is free and open to high school students, Bell said.

Colvig said after she emailed Bell, it was Bell who encouraged WSU to set up the competition. Colvig, meanwhile, made a flier and talked up the competition to her classmates.

Colvig has always been interested in languages and found the Linguistics Olympiad when looking for linguistics competitions. The puzzles and the logic, Colvig said, were interesting to do. Thursday will be her first time participating in a linguistics competition.

“It makes it neat to see how languages have a logic to them,” Colvig said.

Example problems are available on the North American Computational Open Competition website at naclo.org. The questions touch on topics like grammar, plurals and the way languages work in everyday life, Bell said. The questions are written by linguists who study languages.

One website question, titled “Don’t stress,” asks participants to identify the stress system of Ho-Chuck. Ho-Chuck is a regional language spoken by about 250 people in Iowa, Nebraska and Wisconsin. Stress systems, the question explains, give some syllables emphasis over others.

The question provides examples in English and Ho-Chuck before listing five words for the participants to identify how the stress system works for those words.

The puzzles are solved using logic skills, and no linguistics or secondary languages are required, according to the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition website.

Bell said by hosting the event, WSU hopes to “get the word out and get students interested in linguistics.”

Nelson can be reached at knelson@dnews.com.