Posted on 05/28/2015 8:48:21 PM PDT by cold start
The winning words in the nail-biter final were 'scherenschnitte' and 'nunatak'
In a dramatic, flawless final round, two eighth-graders proved to be joint winners at the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee. One a girl and one a boy, one from Kansas and one from Missouri, one a five-time finalist and one a six-timer, 13-year-old Vanya Shivashankar and 14-year-old Gokul Venkatachalam put both their hands on the trophy and thrust it into the air on Thursday evening—after spelling word after word that few people could even hope to pronounce correctly.
Shivashankar’s winning word was scherenschnitte, meaning the art of cutting paper into decorative designs. Venkatachalam’s was nunatak, a hill or mountain completely surrounded by glacial ice.
This is the second year in a row that the final has yielded co-champions. Last year was the first time in 52 years that two people had shared the trophy, and 2015 marks the first time in the bee’s 90-year history that there have ever been co-champions two years in a row. This is only the fifth tie ever.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Seems like the subcontinent pretty much owns the Scripps...
Being Asian neither could get into an Ivy League school.
That said, these kids obviously dedicated the time required to memorize these words to win the competition. Good for them.
Don't care very much what ethnicity wins.
Cute kids and it’s great to see them jointly beaming with pride at their accomplishment. Competing at that level is amazing...those words are killers. But scherenschnitte is a heck of a lot harder than nunatak.
It’s not fair to the Black kids that the Indian-Americans are winning all the spelling contests.
After learning to spell their last names, the bee must have been a breeze.
Congrats to both winners!!!!
The fix is in — two Indian winners each year, instead of one! ;)
We watched Vanya win the “Genius” TV series this spring. She is indeed a champion! Very nice family, too.
And they are allowed to leave the “g” off of words ending in “ing”.
They would have to be top notch spellers in order to spell their names correctly!
Educated Indians seem to have a really good grasp of language. It’s probably why they’re receptive to computer programming. Must be that English influence.
No mention in the linked article if these kids attend publik screwels or are home schooled.
It's possible, I surmise, that having to learn how to spell surnames like, "Shivashankar" and "Venkatachalam" might give one an advantage in learning to spell other words...
I said the same thing. LOL
The spelling itself may be of marginal utility ... the intelligence, the huge vocabulary, the dedication and the attention to detail will serve them well throughout their lives.
I read that one attends public school. Not sure about the other. But they didn’t learn to spell like that in public school.
Those long names may seem hard for Westerners, but are pretty routine in India and easy for Indians to spell. Indians get equally confused about French words with excess vowels and weird spellings and pronunciations which are not at all phonetic.
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