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India won one gold and three bronze medals plus one Honourable Mention at the 23rd International Linguistics Olympiad in Bucharest, Romania.
Shrilakshmi Venkatraman took the individual gold with a score of 70.0.
The contest drew 255 individual competitors from more than 40 countries.
India's cumulative IOL tally since first participating in 2009 reached 37 individual medals.
The team is selected through the Panini Linguistics Olympiad, with mentorship run by IIIT Hyderabad's Language Technologies Research Centre.
IOL problems present data from languages competitors have never seen and ask them to deduce the underlying rules — in phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics and language comparison. No prior knowledge of the language is required or useful; the skill tested is pattern recognition and logical deduction. This is why it sits among the International Science Olympiads despite being about language.
Simple Analogy: Like being handed a page of an unknown script with a few translations, and working out the grammar from the patterns alone.
General Awareness > Awards, Honours and Achievements
GS Paper I > Indian Culture and Language
The ancient Sanskrit grammarian whose Ashtadhyayi is among the earliest systematic grammars of any language; the national olympiad is named after him.
The study of how words are formed from smaller meaningful units.
The study of how words combine into phrases and sentences.