Cal 🥵
There is a stone ball referred to as "4.0 Ball" in front of a campus structure.
What is the Campanile?
The first scholar to study phonology was in this year BC.
What is 300 BC?
The Bible is the most widely translated book, followed by which novel?
What is Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio?
This letter is the most commonly used of the English alphabet.
(For the next 1 minute, discuss within your teams.)
What is the letter 'e'?
At 2 years of age, most babies should be able to have a vocabulary of up to this many words.
What is 300 words?
The gold nugget that was found at the site of a campus library is thought to be the legendary gold nugget found by John Marshall on January 24, 1848 that kicked off the Gold Rush.
What is the Bancroft Library?
Until this year articles in the International Phonetic Association's Journal were published in IPA.
What is 1971?
This language has the longest alphabet, with 74 characters.
What is Cambodian?
This is the shortest sentence in English.
(For the next 2 minutes, discuss within your teams.)
What is 'I am'?
In this Southeast Asian language, 'air' means 'water'.
What is Indonesian?
Steve Wosniak dormed at this dorm building in Unit 3.
What is Norton Hall?
There used to be special phonetic typewriters to write in IPA costing upwards of this much money today.
What is $3200?
This is the most flexible and updated language in the world, with almost 4000 additions every year.
What is English?
This five-letter word is one of the only words in English where only the first letter is pronounced.
(For the next 3 minutes, discuss this within your teams.)
What is 'queue'?
If you are an English speaker, the U.S. Foreign Service Institute has divided languages into four tiers of difficulty. Those in the first tier are the easiest and the fourth tier have the most difficult ones for English speakers to learn. Place each of these in their respective categories: Hebrew, Bulgarian, Urdu, Swahili, Czech, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Amharic, German.
(For the next 5 minutes, discuss this within your teams.)
What is:
- Tier One: German, Swahili
- Tier Two: Bulgarian, Urdu
- Tier Three: Amharic, Hebrew, Czech
- Tier Four: Arabic, Japanese, Chinese
Given that our mascot is the (golden) bear, we have many bear statues all across campus to etch this fact into our skulls. How many bear statues do we have? (The closest answer between the teams will suffice.)
What is 27?
In the US, this is the official language.
What is 'there is no official language'? Get pranked 😤
The Pope tweets in 9 different languages, but this language account is the most popular.
What is Spanish?
This is the longest non-coined monosyllablic word at 11 letters that means 'to hide' (past tense).
(For the next 5 minutes, discuss this within your teams.)
What is 'squirrelled'?
Half of the world is bilingual that speak this many languages in total.
What is 23 languages?
(Each of these languages have 50+ million native speakers: Chinese, English, Spanish, Arabic, French, Persian, German, Russian, Malay, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Lahnda, Tamil, Urdu, Korean, Hindi, Bengali, Japanese, Vietnamese, Telugu, and Marathi.)
UC Berkeley professor and architect John Galen Howard supposedly created and installed this campus structure in 1910 to prevent vampires from coming onto the campus.
What is Sather Gate?
What children's novel are you able to attain today completely transcribed in IPA?
What is Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland?
This island language has 200 different words for 'rain'.
What is Hawaiian?
There are 9 different ways to say 'ough.' Try to identify with as many as possible.
(For the next 7 minutes, discuss this within your teams.)
What is: ‘A rough coated, dough faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed’.
An indigenous language from this island country has only 11 letters, making it the smallest alphabet.
What is the language of Rotokas from Papua New Guinea?