Enric, I actually played a tiny bit of Spanish Scrabble in my 8th grade Spanish class. Thank you for the fisescrabble link. Jason talked a little bit about languages in his CGP announcement, but I'd be happy to say some more about our plans. Multilingual support is very high priority to both Jason and me. Though of course we want to have a powerful program in English (sims with inferences etc) and I have a personal jones for Clabbers and other variants, languages are shaping up to be something of a niche for Quackle. Such broad support for languages as we'd like to have might be only "first" for Quackle. Most of our other ideas were/are present in some form in BobBOT or Maven, though few if any of us got to play with BobBOT or Maven's more interesting features.
If you can put an alphabet, tile values, and a word list together, Quackle will support your language. At a minimum, we expect to have these languages included. We'd appreciate help with some of these from those with more experience. This is an excellent resource of which we will make plenty of use: http://gtoal.com/wordgames/#foreignscrab English TWL98, OWL2, OSWI, and the best unofficial Collins I can put together, until an actual CSW list exists. French ODS lists have always been easy to find on the net. Have even computed very rough ODS4 leave values and playability lists. Welsh Like Spanish, Welsh has digraph tiles. I have a Welsh set and am very slowly starting to learn the language. I generated a very crude word list from a database of Welsh text I found on the web, and I started to turn the .pdfs of Geiriadur Prifsygol Cymru into a word list. It's hard to know exactly what to do for the word list. My gut feeling is that it's important to have a list of roughly the same size as TWL, OSWI, ODS, etc. From my brief experience playing Scrabble with small dictionaries as a kid, I think it's necessary to go large if anyone would want to play a decent expert-level game, but GPC is truly huge (six THOUSAND pages, perhaps as many as 300k words) and full of archaicisms. My hunch is that Y Geiriadur Mawr would be better, but I don't have a print copy, let alone electronic. Such a weird little obsession I've had. How many people actually care about Welsh Scrabble anyway? Italian, Romanian, Dutch We have zero experience with these languages, but they should be easy since they all have ISC support and official dictionaries. Is there some controvery about Italian? Which is used more, PARO or Zingarelli? Italian Scrabble also seems to have an odd rule about the blanks. They score the usual zero in plays, but cost 15 points in the deadwood/countback/whatever that's technically called. You don't want to get stuck with a blank in Italian. Spanish Several people have already requested Spanish. Is RAE the undisputed official word source? I spoke with Alejandro Gonzalez at the WSC in November, and I wasn't entirely sure from our conversation what the status of the dictionary was. If you could point me in the direction of an electronic word list, I'd be very happy. Greek, Hebrew I thought these would be fun too. I could use some help finding/choosing wordlists. Apparently Hasbro and Spears have/had competing Hebrew sets of tiles. The counts and points differ and the Hasbro set lacks a kaf. Other languages with Hasbro / Spears/Mattel sets Should be very simple to add, but in most cases we don't have word lists. Korean This is Jason's idea. I don't know anything about Korean except from skimming this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language I'll be excited to see what he comes up with. He'll have to create his own tile distribution. Klingon, L33T We aren't terribly interested in either of these, but recognize that in the near future there might be value in pandering to Slashdot geeks. We will provide tools for adding other languages. The user will be able to create an alphabet and enter Unicode representations of the letters. Then a text file of a wordlist can be used to create a DAWG or GADDAG file. The "alphabet" and "dictionary" are totally arbitrary. They could for example be the 10 digits and a list of prime numbers. We might also include tools for calculating leave values and study lists. If anybody has information about word lists, or if there is anything important that we'll need to know about supporting the languages I mentioned (thanks to Rebecca for mentioning Hebrew. I don't think I'd actually thought of the implications of right-to-left, but that's a very simple matter), please mail Jason and me or post to the Quackle list. Thanks, John ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/0liolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/quackle/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
