Do they play Scrabble in Germany?

[Lance]

Do they play Scrabble in Germany?

GermanScrabble.jpg (24.64 KiB) Viewed 3363 times

[Enzo]

Well sure, and with a triple word score space, you can finish up and go home early in one meld.

[Arneb]

Exactly!

One of our favourite fancy-schmantzy weeklies for intellectual effetes has had a Scrabble column for for more than a decade now, and there is a yearly German (speakers) championship. Besides, the ability to agglomerate words (the shop sign in the jpg translates as floor grinding machines rental) can earn you LOTS of points. Which is why Scrabble players are limited to words contained in "the" authoritative German dictionary, the Duden. Another nice thing is a rule that conjugated and declensed forms are also perrmisseble. "tun" (to do) becomes getanes if you make it a participle perfect singular, neutral gender. Unvertäutes, Zynismen, or Gegrüßtem on a triple word value field, anyone?

[Enzo]

Knowing next to nothing of German, umlauts can occur over a letter or not, yes? (IOW, there is no letter that is always umlauted?) So in Scrabble there, do you just ignore them, and use the letter? Or do you have umlauted tiles and plain tiles for the same letter? or maybe the question I should as is in German are those different letters or is the thing just a punctuation? And by extension, maybe the tildes over N in Spanish.



let me see, I know kraut, wurst, bier, and of course, umlaut. Oh and weinerschnitzel. Not sure how much further my vocabulary ranges. U-boat, Das Boot, Gert Frobe, maybe I know more than I think... probably not.

[Arneb]

Just to play German head teacher: It's Bier, Kraut, Wurst, Wiener Schnitzel, U-Boot, das Boot and Gert Fröbe. We capitalize the nouns. The articles aren't capitalized, except at the beginning of a sentence or of a headleine (not within a headline).

The crossword puzzle convention is that umlauts are written as two leters, ae,oe and ue, and that ß (originally sz) is writtes as double s. It gives a crossword puzzle writer more freedom. In Scrabble, however, there are umlaut chips with high values (Ü, 5; Ä, 6; Ö, 8. X has 8, and Y and Q have 10) but no ß, which is also turned into double s.

As for Spanish, I don't know - but I learnt ll and the tilded n as distinct letters, so I would expect... ah, well, here's the Wiki!

[Arneb]

Here's one I'd like to find, once in my life: Myxödemen

[Enzo]

And if Superman gets you to say that backwards, you return to some other dimension?