Linguist wins gold at contest
A YOUNG linguist deciphered complex language puzzles to win gold at a competition.
Juliette Gorb, 18, from Langley, impressed examiners at the Linguistics Olympiad competition for students of any age and ability to solve linguistic data problems.
Juliette, 18, an A Levels student in the King’s School Sixth Form in French, Spanish and English Literature, put her success down to a love of language.
She said: “Wherever you go in the world you should take the time to learn a few words of their language.
“It will make life that much easier, you will be accepted more easily and it will even improve your own English.
Juliette who got 10A*s in her GCSEs hopes to go to University College London to study Politics with Modern Foreign Languages.
She added: “I have always loved languages and trying to decipher meaning.
“For me the Linguistics Olympiad was a bit like trying to solve the Enigma code.
“Once you understand one type of language you can use that as a model to learn how other languages work.”
Juliette was one of around 70 students to win gold from an initial entry of over 1,400.
She had to decipher Murrinhpatha, an indigenous language from Australia, Japanese, and Old Norse, written using Runes rather than the modern alphabet.
Ian Dalgleish, King’s Head of Modern Foreign Languages, said: “Juliette sat a fiendish set of tests requiring considerable logical thought and an ability to look at language in the abstract in two or three hours of codebreaking, analysing the patterns in a small amount of linguistic data, and working out how the underlying system works.”
The UK Linguistics Olympiad is a competition for students who are still at school or college any age, any ability.
Coming in the top 10 per cent and winning silver awards at King’s School were Matt Harden, Victoria Tann and Holly Kitching, while Elise Boothroyd gained a bronze award.