How OzCLO changed my life, Part 3

With the 2016 IOL in the past, and its Australian participants duly celebrated at a school assembly, the time seemed ripe to foster the interest in the OzCLO competition at my school still further. One of my motives, I must sheepishly admit, was the possibility of enjoying another precious trip to the IOL with another team of prodigious linguists.

I hit upon the idea of holding a mini-OzCLO in Term 4, with slightly simplified puzzles, to generate interest prior to the competition proper in Term 1 of the following year. But where to get the puzzles from? There were plenty of past problems available online, but I felt that full-on OzCLO/NACLO puzzles would be too difficult for an informal intra-school event, and would only serve to intimidate and deter potential participants.

So, gradually, I came around to the idea of designing my own problems. And although I still remembered a reasonable amount from my linguistics days at university, this meant hitting the books and acquainting myself properly again with the discipline. Once again I strove to understand concepts such as epenthesis, lenition, ergativity, moiety and all the rest. And it fascinated me as much as it did the first time; it felt like meeting an old friend for a good conversation after a long period of separation.

My first problem efforts tended to be a case of “write about what you know”, dealing chiefly with languages with which I was familiar. But slowly I started researching some other languages and sniffing out puzzle ideas in them. At the end of 2017, more in the spirit of experimentation than expectation, I submitted a few of these puzzles to the collators of the problem pool for the English-language linguistics competitions, including OzCLO, NACLO, UKLO and AILO. Imagine my surprise when this happened:

They liked ‘em!

Delighted with the vote of confidence, I now threw myself into “composition” with the zeal of the convert, and pored over obscure grammars in the hope of finding new ideas for linguistics puzzles. Growing familiarity with concepts in linguistics, I must add, vastly enriched my professional practice as a language teacher. And OzCLO participation boomed at my school, with the number of participating students pushing 100 already by 2018.

In 2019, it was IOL Golden Ticket time again, as another talented group of students from my school snatched second place in the national round. This time the location was South Korea, and again the intrepid Vicki Milne and I accompanied the group. Another unforgettable experience for us all, and a very instructive one for me, as I found myself learning a great deal at the feet of the master linguists on the international jury and among the team leaders.

Back at the IOL: Yongin, South Korea, August 2019

Needless to say, I carried on with my problem endeavours post-IOL. But it was another development, during the Covid lockdowns, which set me on the path towards the Language Garden. To be concluded in Part 4…