Today the British linguistics community is launching a campaign to make language analysis – the study of patterns in language – part of mainstream school education.

To celebrate this campaign, about which more below, here’s a puzzle about Yoda, the cuddly Star Wars Jedi Master. Ready are you?

Unless you’ve been hiding in a galaxy far, far away, you will know that Yoda speaks with a distinctive grammar. He inverts pairs of phrases before speaking. If Yoda says “Believe you I don’t”, we know what he means is “I don’t believe you.”

Here’s a way to mark up a Yoda sentence to recover its original meaning.

<[believe you] [I don’t]>

In this notation the “[ ]” means preserve the relative order of the phrases inside the brackets (of which there must be exactly two) and the “< >“ means invert the order. So in this case the annotation means “you” comes after “believe” and “don’t” comes after “I”, but “I don’t” comes before “believe you”.

Now the first part of the puzzle. For each of these following annotated Yoda sentences, write down the original.

1) < go [ you must ] >

2) < [ strong [ with [ the force ] ] ] < [this [ one is ] ] < think I > > >

3) < [ < < home [ milk < coming before > ] > [ < to forget > < up pick > ] > tonight ] < don’t please > >

Congratulations if you have got this far. You have shown Jedi-like abilities at using what linguists would call an “unlabeled inversion transduction grammar”, which is a powerful formalism used in machine translation.

Next, mark up the following Yoda sentences in such a way that they each recover the original meaning, which is ‘use the Force Luke’. It might be the case that there are multiple solutions (in which case say so) or there may be no solutions.

1) use Force Luke the

2) Luke the Force use

3) Luke Force the use

4) the Luke use Force

5) the Luke Force use

There are 24 ways of ordering four objects. That’s because there are four choices for the first position, three choices left for the second position, two left for the third position, and one left for the fourth, making 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24 possible choices.

If Yoda was able to rearrange the words ‘use the Force Luke’ in any way he wanted, therefore, there are 24 ways he could do this. If he is only allowed to use the rules of this puzzle, that is using the [ ] and the < > brackets, how many ways are there that he can rearrange ‘use the Force Luke’?

By the way, this puzzle is much easier if you put on a silly Yoda voice while trying to solve it.

Now back to Britain’s linguists and their own intergalactic mission.

The Committee for Linguistics in Education is today launching Language Analysis in Schools: Education and Research (Laser) – a campaign to introduce some linguistics into the UK curriculum – at the British Academy in London

Richard Hudson, emeritus professor of linguistics at University College London, says: “Language analysis uncovers the systems that we use to communicate, so it should be part of every child’s education. It combines the formal rigour and satisfaction of mathematics and the natural sciences with the cultural enrichment and human interest associated with the humanities. But language analysis of this kind is virtually absent from the UK’s schools, in contrast with many countries which seem to be more successful in education. It’s time to give our children the opportunity to catch up.”

< [ < [ < [ hear! hear! ] > ] > ] >

For more information you can read the Laser manifesto here.

Today’s puzzle was written by computer scientist Jonathan May and originally appeared in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad.

I’ll be back at 5pm UK time with the solutions.

UPDATE: The solutions are now up.

PLEASE NO SPOILERS. Please write all comments using the Yoda notation, and if possible also in a silly voice.

< [ with < puzzle the > ] < < luck of > best > >

I set a puzzle here every two weeks on a Monday. I’m always on the look-out for great puzzles. If you would like to suggest one, email me.

Football School Season 3

I’m the author of several books of popular maths, including the puzzle book Can You Solve My Problems?, as well as the Football School book series for kids that explains the world through football. Football School Season 3, with chapters on probability, bio-physics, ecology, fashion, how to be a commentator and the science of smelly socks, is just out in paperback. (Linguists will be unsurprised that in the US the books are called Soccer School.)