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Florida 12-year-old Bruhat Soma wins 96th Scripps National Spelling Bee after competition’s second-ever spell-off

By Sydney Bishop and Christina Maxouris, CNN (5/31/24)

—

Bruhat Soma, 12, of Florida won the 96th Scripps National Spelling Bee Thursday night after defeating all seven other finalists and beating his final competitor in the Bee’s second-ever spell-off.

Bruhat spelled 29 words correctly during that spell-off, while 12-year-old Faizan Zaki of Texas, spelled 20 words correctly. The two shared a handshake after Bruhat was announced this year’s champion.

Spell-offs are special rounds activated to determine a champion once the competition exceeds a certain time and there’s more than one competitor left, according to the Spelling Bee’s rules. In a spell-off, the contestant who spells the most words correctly in 90 seconds wins.

“When they first announced there was a spell-off, my heart was pumping so fast but then I realized – because I was practicing spell-offs for six months – I realized that, ‘Maybe I have a shot at winning,’” Bruhat told CNN’s John Berman and Kate Bolduan Friday morning. “And I did.”

The word that crowned Bruhat champion: abseil.

He calls those 90 seconds “kind of exhilarating.”

“I’m really excited. It’s been my goal for this past year to win, and I’ve been working really hard,” Bruhat said while still on stage, clutching his trophy. “I really can’t describe it, I’m still shaking.”

To get to his trophy, Bruhat correctly spelled habitude, indumentum, dehnstufe, Okvik and Hoofddorp, and correctly defined “sine qua non.”

What comes next in the CNN report is highly significant, both for the nature of spelling mastery and for touch typing:

Many watching on air noticed Bruhat’s method of “typing” the words while on stage by pantomiming pressing the correct keys for each letter. Bruhat told CNN this motion comes from his practice of typing words into spelling practice websites, and doing so on stage “simulates that experience.”

I ask Language Log readers whether Bruhat's method applies to them.  When you type, do you mentally pronounce each letter of a word?  Or do you apply "whole word" entry?

For the first fifty or so years of my life, I iterated every single letter of words that I typed on a typewriter or entered in a computer — almost as a point of honor.  By the time I was sixty, after I had typed millions and millions of words and could do so ever more smoothly, swiftly, and confidently, the words became the units of production — they would just flow onto the screen, almost as though I were speaking them.  I was no longer concerned about spelling out their letters.

…

In addition to Bruhat and Zaki, the finalists included: YY Liang, 12, from New York; Aditi Muthukumar, 13, from Colorado; Shrey Parikh, 12, from California; Ananya Rao Prassanna, 13, from North Carolina; Rishabh Saha, 14, from California; and Kirsten Tiffany Santos, 13, from Texas.

…

This year’s spellers – all age 15 or under – came from all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and Department of Defense Schools in Europe.

The article includes a photograph of the eight finalists.  The spelling bee website has more information about each of the finalists.

It was inevitable that so many of contestants would be desi*.

*Desi (Hindustani: देसी (Devanagari), دیسی (Perso-Arabic), Hindustani: [deːsiː]; also Deshi) is a loose term used to describe the people, cultures, and products of the Indian subcontinent and their diaspora, derived from Sanskrit देश (deśá), meaning "land" or "country". Desi traces its origin to the people from the South Asian republics of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and may also sometimes include people from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and the Maldives.

The ethnonym belongs in the endonymic category (i.e., it is a self-appellation). Desi (देसी/دیسی desī) is a Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) word, meaning 'national', ultimately from Sanskrit deśīya, derived from deśa (देश) 'region, province, country'. The first known usage of the Sanskrit word is found in the Natya Shastra (~200 BCE), where it defines the regional varieties of folk performing arts, as opposed to the classical, pan-Indian margi. Thus, svadeśa (Sanskrit: स्वदेश) refers to one's own country or homeland, while paradeśa (Sanskrit: परदेश) refers to another's country or a foreign land.

(Wikipedia)

 

Selected readings

• "Dog bites man: Indian wins spelling bee" (6/3/23)
• "Spelling bee 2022 — back on track" (6/4/22)
• "Spelling bee 2021 – Indian streak broken!" (7/9/21)
• "What happened to the spelling bee this year?" (10/21/20)
• "Spelling Bee 2019" (5/31/10)
• "The worldly sport of spelling" (6/2/18)
• “Spelling bee champs” (6/1/14)
• “Spelling bees and character amnesia” (8/7/13)
• “Brain imaging and spelling champions” (8/7/15)
• “Spoken Sanskrit” (1/9/16)
• "Once more on the mystery of the national spelling bee" (5/27/16)
• "Spelling bees in the 1940s" (7/10/16)
• "Yet again on the mystery of the national spelling bee" (6/5/17)
• "Of toads, modernization, and simplified characters" (8/16/13) — especially the last two comments on Chinese "spelling bees"
• "Bahasa and the concept of 'National Language'" (3/14/13)
• Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages," The Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 (August, 1994), 707-751, in which it is shown that the concept of "national language" had passed from India to East Asia along with Buddhism in the form of Sanskrit deśa- bhāṣā ("local spoken language"; "language of a country")
• "Keyboarding and typing" (10/1/21) — with extensive bibliography on typing, inputting, writing characters vs. letters, etc.
• "Typing by voice recognition" (8/22/20) — with lengthy list of readings on swyping, romanization, and so forth
• "The weirdness of typing errors" (3/14/22)

[Thanks to H. Krishnapriyan]

June 3, 2024 @ 7:37 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Contests, Spelling

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