After two and a half years, my high-school German class reached a milestone when our teacher put away the textbook and got out the board games. We were so proud to have learned enough of a language that we could actually do something with it.<\/p>\n
Monopoly<\/b> wasn’t a language game per se<\/span>, but playing it in German taught us important words like Los!<\/i>, Miete<\/i> and Hypothek<\/i>. We also learned some geography from the squares on the board.<\/p>\n More challenging \u2014 to my classmates<\/span> \u2014 was Scrabble<\/b>, in which players form words and connect them to words formed by their opponents<\/span>. As I was already a Scrabble wizard<\/span>, we agreed that I would play with the board facing away from me and that my score would have to beat that of all three other players combined.<\/p>\n I won, but still found it challenging because the German letters had different values than the English letters. In English, any word using the letter J, Q, X or Z is an easy path to victory, particularly if you can put it in a good spot. K is also very useful. In German, though, J, K and Z are common; it’s Y you have to look out for, and Q is almost impossible to play.<\/p>\n When he created Scrabble 75 years ago, Alfred Mosher Butts based the letter values for English<\/a> on the relative infrequency of those letters in the language. That’s why, in English, the most frequent letters \u2014 E, T, A, O, I, N, S, R, L and U \u2014 each get you only one point. In theory.<\/p>\n Butts’s method was to count how often the letters appeared on the front page of The New York Times<\/i>. In the words of<\/a> John Chew, co-president of the North American Scrabble Players’ Association, this created “a selection bias<\/span> in favor of printed newspaper English which many people have suggested ought to be rectified<\/span>.”<\/p>\n One of those advocating<\/span> reform is software author Joshua Lewis, who points out that “the dictionary of legal words in Scrabble has changed. … Among the notable<\/span> additions are all of these short words which make it easier to play Z, Q and X.”<\/p>\n By that, he means The Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary<\/i>. It lists all the words that are valid<\/span> for play. However \u2014 like the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary it’s based on \u2014 it includes thousands of obscure terms, outdated expressions and questionable loanwords<\/span>.<\/p>\n Winning a game against a hardcore<\/span> opponent \u2014 at a tournament, for example, or in Japan, where it’s a club<\/span> sport \u2014 requires knowing as many obscure two- and three-letter words as possible, even if they’re not really English words<\/a> at all. Typical examples include \u201cai<\/a>\u201d, a word for a three-toed sloth<\/span> that lives only in Brazil, and “xu”, a Vietnamese penny that went out of use decades ago.<\/p>\n One of the fun aspects of Scrabble, though, is that players are allowed to challenge<\/span> each other’s words. If the word is not in the dictionary, the person challenged loses a turn<\/span>; if it is, the person challenging it loses a turn. One of my more interesting opponents made a real sport of this by inventing words that she claimed stood for Anasazi<\/a> artifacts and rare vegetation. (I challenged them and won.)<\/p>\n But back to Joshua Lewis. He says that in English, X and Z are now much easier to play than they were in 1938, and that Q is more difficult than originally supposed.<\/p>\n Mattel, the company that makes the game in Europe, says it’s not willing to change the letter values to match Lewis’s findings. “It is not a game where fairness is paramount<\/span>. It is a game of luck, and changing the tile<\/span> values wouldn’t achieve anything,” said Scrabble’s representative in Britain.<\/p>\n Not fair? A game of luck? I strongly disagree. It’s about skill, and about language \u2014 and about learning a language, even if it’s your own.<\/p>\n Language note:<\/b> The word “scrabble” has various meanings, mainly as a variation of “scribble” (in US English) or “scramble”. A further meaning is “to struggle by scraping<\/span> or scratching”. An association of mine is with the word “hardscrabble”, which refers to a barren<\/span> place. I think of this whenever I have a worthless hand<\/span>.<\/p>\n Read about how spelling is an official sport<\/b> in America: After two and a half years, my high-school German class reached a milestone when our teacher put away the textbook and got out the board games. We were so proud to have learned enough of a language that we could actually do something with it. Monopoly wasn’t a language game per se, but playing it in German taught us important … >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[16,125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1774,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions\/1774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\nFurther reading<\/h3>\n
Time for a real sporting competition<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"