John,
Thank
you for your quick answer. I am glad to realize that you had already considered
adding Quackle with multilanguage features.
I
am afraid I can not be of very help of many of the languages you mention. Regarding
spanish, the official word source is the RAE
dictionary (22th edition). To the best of my knowledge, there is no available spanish word list (in plain text or similar), at least not
complete or fully reliable. I came across some lists, but I easily found either
mistakes or valid words which weren’t included.
The
problem with spanish is that the “Real Academia
de la Lengua Española” (Spanish Language Royal Academy), which owns the rights
of RAE dictionary, is not interested (at least so far) in providing the full
list. Even in their electronic version of the dictionary, they have set
mechanisms in order to difficult the word extraction process so that it has to
be done almost manually which, as you can easily guess, although not impossible
is very discouraging.
Nevertheless,
there are some lists available out there. Alejandro Gonzalez himself (which I
know because both play at the same club, in Barcelona (Spain)) provides me with one,
not long ago. I can talk to him and ask for it, if you were interested. But let
me insist in their lack of reliability.
Needeless
to say that I offer myself for any help I can provide in porting Quackle to spanish.
Thanks
again and kind regards!
Enric
Hernández
-----Mensaje original-----
De: [email protected]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] En nombre de
John O'Laughlin
Enviado el: lunes, 26 de diciembre
de 2005 6:16
Para: [email protected]
Asunto: Re: [quackle]
Multilanguage Quackle
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
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