Diacritics and word games

[dtilque]

In many word games, you use the same letter in two or more different words. For instance crosswords and Scrabble have words crossing at right angles with the letter at the crossing point in common. Anagrams rearrange the letters to form a different word or sentence, so the same letters are reused as many times as the number of anagrams. Palindromes don't reuse letters, but they require letters from opposite ends of the word or sentence to be the same.

The question here is how do various languages treat the diacritics in word games? Do they ignore them and treat é the same as e, or are they considered different?

From what I understand (and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) is that French (and possibly Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian) ignores the accents on vowels for word games. I don't know what it does for ç (c-cedilla) nor what Spanish does for ñ.

Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian consider the letters with diacritics as different letters, so diacritics are definitely not ignored there. I'm pretty sure the same is true in Finnish and probably in various other Eastern European languages (Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Croatian, etc.) but I'd like confirmation if anyone knows.

German I have no idea about.

Any help here?

[Floater]

Originally posted by dtilque
Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian consider the letters with diacritics as different letters, so diacritics are definitely not ignored there. I'm pretty sure the same is true in Finnish ...
We don't see them as letters with diacritics as they are actually ligatures. The origin of ä is a shorthand way of writing ae, ö and ø is oe and å is aa. AFAIK the same goes for German.

[Short Guy]

Where I come from, we usually ignore diacritics in Scrabble. Of course, we play in Dutch, which has virtually no diacritics, except in loan words.
Floater, are you trying to say that in word games (like Scrabble) you invariably spell e.g. "bröd" as "broed"? I seem to recall that's the way the Germans play it, too.

[Floater]

We spell it bröd. The only times I use oe instead of ö is when I have to give my last name to some English langage data base.

[astorian]

Well, for what it's worth, crossword constructors have always treated letters with diacritical marks as if those marks didn't exist. So, in a New York Times crossword puzzle, 1-Across could be "eclair" (which has an accent over the "e") while 1-Down could be "elephant" (which has not accent). Or 1-Across could be "pinata" (in which the "n" has a tilde) while 3-Down was "nose."

[bordelond]

Say, does anyone know a good way to get my hands on foreign Scrabble games? I have interest in other board games, too, like Monopoly.

[bordelond]

Say, does anyone know a good way to get my hands on foreign Scrabble games? I have interest in other board games, too, like Monopoly.

[bordelond]

Say, does anyone know a good way to get my hands on foreign Scrabble games? I have interest in other board games, too, like Monopoly. I think they'd be great tools to use in foreign language classes here in America, yet I've never seen them used in the classes I've participated in.

[bordelond]

Now see there, kids -- don't press ENTER when you are using the reply box below, else you get a double-post.
:smack:

[dtilque]

Originally posted by astorian
Well, for what it's worth, crossword constructors have always treated letters with diacritical marks as if those marks didn't exist. So, in a New York Times crossword puzzle, 1-Across could be "eclair" (which has an accent over the "e") while 1-Down could be "elephant" (which has not accent). Or 1-Across could be "pinata" (in which the "n" has a tilde) while 3-Down was "nose." Yes, but that's the New York Times, an English-language publication. You can't expect them to pay attention to diacritics.

OK, the idea I'm getting here is that even though äåøö are actually ligatures in Scandinavian languages, they are treated as distinct letters in Scrabble and crossword puzzles. Is that right?

By distinct letters, I mean that ä can only be crossed with ä. That is, it can't be crossed with a plain a (the two dots ignored) and that you can't expand the ligature and spell it aa. Is that right?


BTW, those characters as posted by Floater come out on my browser as square boxes. However, if I look at the source file, I see them correctly. This probably means I need a better verdana font file. Anyone know where I can get one?

[Floater]

Originally posted by dtilque
OK, the idea I'm getting here is that even though äåøö are actually ligatures in Scandinavian languages, they are treated as distinct letters in Scrabble and crossword puzzles. Is that right?

By distinct letters, I mean that ä can only be crossed with ä. That is, it can't be crossed with a plain a (the two dots ignored) and that you can't expand the ligature and spell it aa. Is that right?


Quite right. I would even like to rephrase myself and say that they once upon a time started as ligatures, but are nowadays distinct carachters.

Another try: ä, ö, ø, å

[Sunspace]

Say, does anyone know a good way to get my hands on foreign Scrabble games? The rules (http://www.uni-leipzig.de/esperanto/texte/bibl/ludoj/skrablo.html) for Scrabble in Esperanto. :)