[OLPC-Games] Wordsmith ( Scrabble ) :GSoC application

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 1:07 PM, Joshua N Pritikin <jpritiki at uoregon.edu> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 12:36:14PM -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>  > On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 10:26 AM, Aditya Vishwakarma
>  > <adi.vishwakarma at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > I am Aditya Vishwakarma. An Information Technology student at NSIT, Delhi.
>  > >
>  > > I am working on making a Scrabble game as a GSoC project called Wordsmith.
>  > > The wiki page is located here -
>  > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Wordsmith(scrabble)
>  >
>  > Does Scrabble exist in Hindi or any other language of India?
>
>  Sure.
>
>  Either you place one syllable per square or separate the consonants and vowels
>  into disjoint glyphs (probably looks funny but remains readable).

That sounds like you're making it up, since you say "probably looks
funny". You couldn't make a set with enough tiles to hold the several
hundred possible syllables, and the phonology doesn't work to combine
random syllables into words of any length. Hindi in separated letters
would look more than funny.

होली would end up looking like ह  ो ल  ी, or
ह
 ो
ल
 ी

I'm asking whether anybody has _seen_ Scrabble in an Indian language.

>  > I know
>  > how we could support Scrabble in any linear alphabetic writing such as
>  > Cyrillic alphabet, but I have trouble imagining it in Arabic, Chinese,
>  > Amharic, or Japanese kana.
>
>  I don't know what you would do with Chinese and Japanese kana.

-- 
Edward Cherlin
End Poverty at a Profit by teaching children business
http://www.EarthTreasury.org/
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."--Alan Kay