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Would your 30th language actually be Scots Gaelic?

Say you had something that coule be translated into other languages. Presumably you’d go with the ones that provided the largest possible market. Not everything will work in every language, obvs. Scrabble would be difficult in Chinese perhaps, given ideograms.

But:

Scots Gaelic version of Scrabble released after Isle of Lewis campaign
Latest edition of the board game which is available in 29 languages will be in 1,500-year-old dialect spoken by 60,000 people

Really?

Is there one in Lallans already?

22 thoughts on “Would your 30th language actually be Scots Gaelic?”

  1. I don’t understand your point. It’s not a matter of languages, it’s a matter of character sets. If the language your dealing with uses Latin characters it works with standard Scrabble. The only variation would be points/usage frequency. Jocks write in runes or something?

  2. designed by Dr Teàrlach Wilson, the founder of An Taigh Cèilidh, a cultural centre and community café in Stornoway

    I wonder if Dr Wilson or his organisation benefited from any state, lottery or eu funding? Projects like this don’t exactly come cheap unless the manufacturer sees it as a profit-generator.

    O/T but I’m still waiting for the Ebonics edition.

  3. Surely this is just like those noveltyMonopoly sets, for small towns, or universities.

    Modern printing technology and computer control cuts the price of making minor changes, the product can be a bit more expensive. Biggest market will probably be tourists and in 5 years the charity shops will be full of unopened copies.

  4. “Is there one in Lallans already?”

    Well, there’s one in English. The official Scrabble dictionary for years was Chambers’s 20th Century, published in Edinburgh. It definitely had a few Scottish words in there.

  5. Speakers of Istro-Romanian shouldn’t have long to wait now, though it’s scandalous that a euphonious romance language should yield precedence to an ugly tartan tongue.

  6. Bloke in North Dorset

    Sounds like an ideal AI task if there’s a decent body of written work that can be analysed.

  7. It’s free column inches for Hasbro/Mattel. Just in time for the festive rush too. Well done to the marketing team.

  8. Point of information: in Welsh, CH, DD, FF & LL are considered separate letters. Spanish has a few similar conventions, check a Spanish dictionary: words beginning with CH come after those beginning Cu, similarly with LL. It’s a bugger if you’re trying to code alphabetic listings in Spanish (as I once had to do).

  9. It’s a bugger if you’re trying to code alphabetic listings in Spanish (as I once had to do).

    Not really, you just link with libicu and let someone else do all the work.

  10. Point of information: in Welsh, CH, DD, FF & LL are considered separate letters.

    The technical term is digraph. Two letters for a single sound.

    English has a couple. We use the digraph “th” where we used to use the one, thorn (Þ). The sound of “th” is quite different from that of the letters “t” and “h”.

    Most of us no longer write daemon or aether, but still do have it as archaeology. “Ae” is the previous ash (æ).

  11. Bloke in the Fourth Reich

    Most European languages, most definitely English. would be well served by the Cyrillic script. At least then you wouldn’t have to learn different vowel and often consonant pronunciations for each language.

  12. Not really, you just link with libicu and let someone else do all the work.

    Not much help in COBOL in 1988 🙂

    The technical term is digraph. Two letters for a single sound. English has a couple. We use the digraph “th” where we used to use the one, thorn (Þ). The sound of “th” is quite different from that of the letters “t” and “h”.

    “th” can represent both thorn (Þ) and eth (ð), depending whether it’s voiced (it’s a different sound in ‘thin’ and ‘this’). But we don’t sort it as a separate letter, “th” comes between “te” and “ti” in the dictionary, not after “tz” (not having a Welsh dictionary to hand, I don’t know if they do this, but the Spanish definitely do).

    I don’t understand why archaeologists retained their “ae”, while medievalists dropped theirs. It’s very easy to write æ in Word: ctrl-shift-7 (&) followed by a (or, indeed o for œstrus).

  13. Came across this while researching what was being said about Scrabble for a report.

    (1) We worked hard to persuade Scrabble to do this. We did market research, letter distribution analysis, test games. Sorry that you felt it necessary to comment about other people’s hard word in such a negative bitter way. You want Lallans Scrabble? What’s stopping you from doing it? Don’t blame other people for your lack of initiative.

    (2) Are you really that ignorant about capitalism that you think Scrabble – an international company working in hundreds of companies – would’ve risked failure? We sold out in our first run. Just because you don’t want Scrabble Gàidhlig doesn’t mean that nobody else does. Have you seen how many people are registered to learn Gaelic on Duolingo? Research it.

    (3) To John and others yet again boringly bemoaning funding of Gaelic: We received absolutely no state funding or lottery support. People could easily research this. It is on nearly every article about this that we received no funding support. This assumption that Gaelic is an expense to the tax payer is a prejudice and not rooted in any informed and meaningful evidence. Your prejudice shows your poor research and literacy skills – a very bad reflection on you. Also: the cheek and hypocrisy of talking about markets and expenses, but asking people to donate to you to complain about things should make money. If this were a money making blog, why do you need to beg for money? Dear oh dear.

    (4) Spend your time being a better person. I can think of a million things that would be of better and kinder use than being a grump online about a board game.

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