Faculty in the Department of Linguistics gave local secondary school students and parents a taste of their field at an open house Nov. 10 in Morrill Hall.

The department is building a network among area schools and educators to introduce middle school and high school students to languages and linguistics.

"We had very positive feedback, and they were fascinated to see that there was more going on in their language than they had been aware of," said assistant professor Sam Tilsen.

Students were given examples of linguistic data and the ways linguists look at how words are composed of smaller parts, how they are arranged into sentences and how speech sounds can be combined with each other.

"All of this contributes to expressing meaning," Tilsen said. "Many people think that linguistics is a field where you learn to speak a lot of languages. That's not really what it is about. It's a scientific study of language in general, concerned with structure and patterns across all languages."

Assistant professor Sarah Murray provided a general introduction to the field, including language acquisition and Native American languages, drawing examples from her fieldwork with the Cheyenne in Montana.

The students also solved linguistic problems, using examples from Spanish, French, English and the indigenous language Zapotec, among others.

"We necessarily consider many languages because we want to see the similarities and differences between them," Tilsen said. "There's so much about English we don't understand until we look at it from a comparative or cross-linguistic perspective."

Murray and Tilsen said they became interested in the field as college freshmen.

"I learned about Benjamin Whorf's work on the Hopi conception of time," Tilsen said. "Whorf observed that Hopi expressions for referring to time are very different from our own. This was the basis for the linguistic relativity hypothesis, which holds that one's worldview is influenced by their language. I found that idea fascinating."

Murray said, "I was an English major and asked my adviser if there were classes about the structure of language, and she said that was called 'linguistics.' So I took the Intro to Linguistics class, and the rest is history, I guess. One of my favorite parts of that class was morphology problems, problem sets where you figure out how words in unfamiliar languages are structured. They are basically little logic puzzles, with language."

Secondary school students tackle similar problems in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO), she said. Cornell is a local host site for the annual competition.

"They compete by solving interesting and challenging puzzles in linguistics and computational linguistics," Tilsen said. "It requires no previous knowledge of linguistics, and puzzles can be solved by analytic reasoning alone."

Last year, "of the 13 who participated [locally], two made it to the second round and one placed fifth overall, barely missing a spot on the national team," he said.

The department is aiming to increase participation in the 2013 NACLO competition, Tilsen added. An information and practice session will be held Jan. 26 and the first open round is Jan. 31. See http://linguistics.cornell.edu/outreach/naclo.cfm.

Murray said she is looking forward to expanding the open houses in the future. "Getting young people interested in linguistics is important, and I hope we can raise awareness about Native American languages and endangered languages," she said. "There are about 7,000 languages in the world, many are endangered, and about half are thought to be at risk of disappearing in the next 100 years."