By: Renee Weisz ’17

After school on Tuesdays, rich debate about Noam Chomsky’s work and passionate discussion about obscure foreign language structures echo from room 2052. The club is none other than the Staples’ Linguistics Club.
The club members, led by presidents Preston Lust ’19 and Max Popken ’18, immerse themselves in solving computational linguistics puzzles or investigating languages of interest.
“The Linguistics Club deals with the study of linguistic patterns, primarily in the fields of philology, orthography and phonology,” Ben Jia ’18, a club member, said.
Jia, along with Lust and Carter Teplica ’19 participated in the second round of the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) on March 9. The NACLO is a national competition which is the focus of the club’s yearly preparations. The 100-point linguistics-based logic test consists of a primary open round and a secondary invitational round, which selects qualified participants for the International Linguistics Olympiad, according to the NACLO webpage.
“You might be given a list of 20 words in an obscure language from Uzbekistan and their English translations out of order and have to match them up based on common word parts,” Teplica said.
While Teplica practiced for the competition by attending a mock session at Yale University, the entire club spent hours studying past competition problems available on the NACLO website.
Though preparation materials were easily accessible, Jia found the test offered a challenging analytical exercise, requiring participants to decipher varied languages that ranged from Vietnamese to Turkish. “Some questions commanded the need for the decipherment of foreign syllabaries, or the construction of algorithms to process the transmutation of various sentences,” he said.
Many members like Lust stumbled upon their interest for linguistics through their natural curiosity for language. For Lust, reading “The Lord of The Rings” led to his fascination in the writing system of Old English used as the foundation for the ancient script in the series.
“I found the origins of the English language very fascinating—and soon sought to understand linguistic progression as a whole,” Lust said.
While Jia, Teplica and Lust await the results of the invitational NACLO open round, the club welcomes new members to join in decoding new linguistic theories and deriving linguistic methods every week.