Summer's Over... (Travel, NACLO Problems, Kinship)
I just came back from vacation, and it hit me that summer was pretty much over. That really brought down my mood.
I went on a cruise in the Baltic Sea, and we visited Germany (Berlin), Estonia (Tallinn!! I know it from the Tallinn Manual), Russia (St. Petersburg), Finland (Helsinki), and Sweden (Stockholm). I didn't have much time for any language practice, but I did use the Duolingo app when I had Wi-Fi! Because of that and my travels, I'm actually interested in learning the Russian alphabet! It looks pretty fun (but misleading! The "H" is actually the "N" sound). I also considered learning some Nordic runes; they were used on a NACLO problem a while back. And that got me thinking, if I have time, maybe I should learn Hangul (Korean). Writing systems/alphabets are often very different from each other, but they're so fascinating! Maybe this will be a fun stress-reliever activity during junior year.
Since the school year is about to start soon, I thought I'd sneak in some NACLO practice before I became too busy. (Spoilers for NACLO solutions!! All can be found on http://nacloweb.org/)
I worked on "Basque Tasque" (2017 Round 2, I) on the plane ride back home. I'm proud to say that it was a lot easier for me to solve than back when I did it in March. Basque is spoken in an area on the border of northern Spain and southwestern France! It's ergative-absolutive, which I just learned about recently. Basically, the subject of transitive sentences is treated differently from objects and subjects of intransitive sentences (in this case, it takes a -k ending while the other two don't). One thing that tripped me up was the -a ending attached to pretty much all the nouns; it's the equivalent of "the" (singular).
Yesterday, I worked on "It will be you who solves this problem" (2017 Round 2, M). It's in Maori, which is spoken in New Zealand. Again, I'm so happy to say that this time around, it was a lot easier for me to solve. One thing I found interesting was that "i" was used before action words to mark the past tense, as well as before a noun to mark it as an object. Another feature I noticed was how -a was added after verbs to mark it as passive. I didn't figure out the patterns in the accents, or how korero (accent on first o) became korerotia in the passive, but I guess that wasn't relevant to the problem.
For a quick problem (no solution writing!), I did Cameroon Pidgin English (2014 Round 1, G). I imagined how participants might've been mouthing words to themselves during the actual competition! trong het (strong head) = stubborn, gut hat (good heart) = kindness/generosity, and so on. It really made me think about the core meanings of words, as well as consonant clusters being reduced.
For the last of my updates, I recently wrote an article about kinship systems for a writing competition, since there has been problems about skins in NACLO and kinship systems in IOL (Fun fact: Maori uses the Hawaiian system.). I might post it here sometime!
I'll update soon with other language-related posts!
