Is there a “W” in Spanish “Scrabble”? If so - how many points is it worth? “W” is rare in French as well - thus its 10-point score in French “Scrabble”.
When I text in German I just switch to the German keyboard and the umlauted vowels are right there with their own keys (but you need to long press “s” to get ß). Of course the keyboard switches from QWERTY to QWERTZ, but I don’t touch type anyway. Similarly the Spanish keyboard has a key for ñ (but you still need to long press for the other accented letters.
According to Wikipedia, Spanish Scrabble outside North America do not include “W” or “K” while those sold in North America do. There is also variation with “CH”, “LL”, and “RR” tiles depending on locale.
Yeah, always fun to argue if those are single or double letters.
On my Android phone, if I’m typing in French or Spanish, I’ll just type the word without accents and then choose (hopefully) the correct one from the suggestions.
IME, RR never really got as much traction AFAIK, probably because it did not actually turn into a different enough sound.
(The international meeting of the Academias gave up on CH and LL being treated as self-standing “letters” back in the 90s and eventually made it uniformly official that they were NOT in this century)
In the versions of Scrabble with, say, “LL”, are you allowed to spell words with a double L using two L tiles? I.e., would [L][L][A][M][A] be a legal word?
It may depend on the specific version, but I have a “Simpsons Scrabble en Español” where the rules say that words with CH, LL, and RR must use the corresponding two-letter tiles, so “llama” must be played with exactly 4 tiles.
According to Wikipedia, no:
Using one C and one H tile in place of the CH tile, two L tiles for the LL tile, or two R tiles for the RR tile is also not allowed in Spanish Scrabble.
You also cannot use a blank as “W” or “K”.
Note that the extent of my Spanish is what one picks up living in AZ. I did not know until this thread that “W” was not native to Spanish. This might explain why I had so much trouble spelling my name (which starts with “W”) when I was in Spain last year.
What is Spanish for the letter “W”?
Italian is the same way; the letters J, K, W, X, and Y are used only in loanwords, but the letters exist in the alphabet and have ways to pronounce them (for example, J is “long I”, and W is “double V”).
There was much derision when the Real Academia de la Lengua Española introduced the spelling güisqui for whisky, somewhere around 1980. It is still in the dictionary with that spelling, with a reference to its synonym whisky (properly written) and nobody uses that hispanized spelling except in jest, as far as I am aware.
I guess we have that letter because it is used in many words abroad that would look silly if we tried to change that letter for something else, for instance the Capital of the USA and its first president. We could try to do as the Russians do, who write Shakespeare Уи́льям Шекспи́р, that is: Uíliam Shekspir. But that is not the way the Spanish Academy chose, and it looks less bad in Russian IMO because they hide behind a different alphabet.
So yes, it is a useful letter, the Academy included it 1969, but it is only used for loanwords, foreign names and the like.
Which is the right way to do it! Kudos!
Not only there is no “W” or “K” in the Spanish scrabble (pronounced ess-cráble) edition, that is the ones sold outside the USA, it is not even allowed to use the two blank tiles as a “W” or a “K”. But it seems the Spanish versions sold in the USA have three aditional pieces, 103 instead 100 in total. Cite (Spanish wikipedia) The cite does not say it explicitly, but it seems those would be Ws and Ks.
Uve doble, which means literally “double V”.
Yeah, really, in Scrabble in general, whatever the version, they prefer if you did not re-compound the letters.
As someone of the close-to-US sphere of the Spanish-speaking world, earning the language as a grade-school child, the notion of having the English “W” be rendered as a “gu-” confused me. To me, the phonemes I was hearing behind “water”, “Western” and “whisky”, transposed in Spanish “obviously” to my ears more like “huáter”, “huestern” and “huisqui” (or “juisqui” ). And my teachers went just for the "say it like an “u” " technique.
I do recall a history book in the 1970s referring to Gualterio Raleigh. As mentioned in an earlier post that probably did it for a lot of people at some point: “Nope, Walter it’s going to be, just like Mr. Mercado. Bring on the W.”
And of course, for Latin America we assume the English phoneme and not the Germanic as back in the mother country. Because we knew which one we’d get more use of.
That is another one the various professors and broadcasters had been amusing us with for years – if we call the letter “doble-ve”, “doble-u”, “uve-doble” or what. My take would be as long as you can understand what is being said, never mind. Like with whether we refer to the Y as “i griega” or “ye”.
You’re right, the “uve doble” is Spain’s Spanish, “doble ve” is South American, and just as valid. “Doble-u” is new to me, but that is just my ignorance.
I was only answering to Marvin_the_Martian’s question, who had trouble being understood when spelling his name in Spain. “Uve doble” would have solved it.
Letting this thread sink in for a while I have come to the conclusion that one of the reasons the Academy accepted “W” as a Spanish letter was also that there was space for it in a normal keyboard, specially considering that both in QWERTZ and QWERTY configurations it plays a prominent role. I guess the placing on the keyboard preceded and influenced the decision by the Academy (no cite for that).
Whatever about Shakespeare, but you’ll be amazed to hear I know a guy from Latin America named Guillermo 
I do not want to go off on too much of a tangent, but evidently what (assuming it even exists in the alphabet) counts as a single letter, what as a letter with an accent, and what as a digraph or ligature varies from language to language. So, e.g., in English W is today a single letter, but LL and CH count as two letters, whereas in Spanish the latter two are single “letters”. In French Ä is a letter with an accent, but in Swedish it counts as a single letter. We could go on in this vein for a while.
French is similar. There are no native French words beginning with “k” or “w.” French dictionaries use “kangarou” and “wagon” (railway car - pronounced with a “v” sound).
The “K” sound is usually represented by a “c” (franc) and the “w” by “ou” (oui).
Well, English doesn’t have any compound letters (maybe W was at one point, but it’s unambiguously a single letter now). Many word games will treat “Qu” as a single letter, because it’d be too difficult to use Q by itself, but Scrabble doesn’t even do that (and the Official Scrabble Dictionary recognizes several words with a Q without a U).
Can you explain it? What was the thinking behind using “gu” to spell a “w” sound?
French also has “wattman” (driver of a tram/streetcar, but maybe it coukd be a driver of any electric public transit vehicle).