wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (01/26/85)
How common or prevalent are crossword (and similar) puzzles outside the English-speaking countries? Are they commonly found in newspapers and speciality magazines in most countries whose script uses alphabets, or are they a uniquely Anglo-American pastime? I recall a Thai fellow-student in an Army class at Ft. Lee being completely bewildered by a puzzle I was solving (it happened to be a Kingsley double- crostic, but in many ways similar to ordinary crosswords); he found it to be something completely alien to his experience. I could see that many Oriental languages might be unsuited to crossword-style puzzles, but I would think that most Western languages would work OK. However, I've read that English has a much richer pool of synonyms to draw upon, which makes it more suitable for both easy and elaborately-difficult clues. Comments welcomed. Regards, Will Martin USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin or ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA
hopp@nbs-amrf.UUCP (Ted Hopp) (01/27/85)
I lived for several years in Latin America and the newspapers there
routinely carried crossword puzzles in Spanish. (I wasn't interested
in them at the time, so I don't know what they were like.) I have
also seen Israeli crossword puzzles in Hebrew.
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Ted Hopp {seismo,umcp-cs}!nbs-amrf!hopphopp@nbs-amrf.UUCP (Ted Hopp) (01/27/85)
Newsgroups: net.nlang,net.games
Subject: Re: Crossword puzzles
References: <7727@brl-tgr.ARPA>
I lived in Latin America for several years and the newspapers there
routinely published crossword puzzles in Spanish. I wasn't interested
in them at the time, so I don't know what they were like. I have also
seen Israeli crossword puzzles in Hebrew. In fact, there is a Hebrew
version of Scrabble (tm).
--
Ted Hopp {seismo,umcp-cs}!nbs-amrf!hoppmatt@oddjob.UChicago.UUCP (Matt Crawford) (01/29/85)
A postdoc we had here from China (P.R.C.) told me that they even have crossword puzzles back there! I didn't get an impression of what the diagrams look like, but the clues are generally based on the multiple meanings of the same symbols. I guess you could call them puns. _____________________________________________________ Matt University crawford@anl-mcs.arpa Crawford of Chicago ihnp4!oddjob!matt
simon@elwood.DEC (Product Safety 237-3521) (01/30/85)
I was born and grew up in Russia. Crosswords are very popular over there, in fact, so popular, that people who do not like them, clip them out from newspapers to bring to their friends. Russian is not less flexible then English, which is the reason that Russian crosswords are not easier, though they are slightly different in rules (e.g. only nouns can be used, etc.). Leo Simon decwrl!rhea!elwood!simon
jjchew@utcs.UUCP (John Chew) (01/30/85)
In article <7727@brl-tgr.ARPA> wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) writes: > How common or prevalent are crossword (and similar) puzzles outside the > English-speaking countries? > > Will Martin > > USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin or ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA The Japanese language is not suited to crossword puzzle design, and I have never seen a Japanese crossword puzzle outside of a language course for non-native speakers. Problems include: 1. If you use the kanji (ideogram) script, words are very short (one, two, three characters). Think of trying to design an English xword puzzle where a word would be split into boxes not by letters but by groups of letters that carry meaning. Sure, "Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" would stretch into nine or ten boxes (pneumono/ultra/micro/scopic/silico/volcano/ coni/os/is), and you could start listing words across it, like "Pneumonia", "Ultralight", "Microcomputer", etc. but is this fun? (might be a bit of a novelty, but it would wear thin, I think). 2. If you use the kana (syllabic) script, puzzles would certainly not be difficult to design, owing to the nature of the vocabulary, but I can't really see solving them being very interesting. Again, think of a syllabic puzzle in English. The words aren't long enough. Puzzles in the romanized script might be feasible. If anyone knows any more about them, I'd be interested in hearing from them. -- university of toronto computing services: john j. chew, iii {decvax,ihnp4,utcsrgv,allegra!utzoo,linus!utzoo}!utcs!jjchew
alan@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Alan Algustyniak) (01/30/85)
>How common or prevalent are crossword (and similar) puzzles outside the >English-speaking countries? When i was in Budapest in 1979, i noticed that there seemed to be a mania about x-word puzzles. At every corner news-stand, it seemed that 50% of the magazines on display were devoted to x-word puzzles. sdcrdcf!alan
das@ucla-cs.UUCP (02/06/85)
Will Martin writes: > I recall a Thai fellow-student in an Army class at Ft. Lee being completely > bewildered by a puzzle I was solving (it happened to be a Kingsley double- > crostic, but in many ways similar to ordinary crosswords); he found it to > be something completely alien to his experience. If there's a language written with an alphabet that would be hard to construct crossword puzzles in, it's probably Thai. Out of curiosity, I naively tried to learn the alphabet to be able to sound out the names on Thai menus -- the book (!) explaining it was about 60 pages long. [Thai is written with an alphabet, not a syllabary.] The forms and positions of the vowels change depending on their tone and the tones of other syllables. Some vowels are written like Pakistan at the Partition -- part before and part after the consonant which precedes it when spoken. Sometimes different vowels in different circumstances have the same written form. [I may have some details wrong, but you get the idea.] I gave up. From an information theoretic viewpoint, it seems clear that the more redundant a language, the harder it is to construct an American-style crossword puzzle (i.e. highly interconnected). A crossword puzzle construction book I read (forgot the title & author) said that the easiest way to construct a puzzle is to draw the framework, blacken the pattern, fill every other square (checkerboard style) with random consonants, and then fill the rest with random vowels. Then perturb it until every horizontal and vertical is a word (work on the long ones first, then go area by area, changing letters until everything's set). Then make up definitions. If there's a theme to the puzzle, you might first fill in the long words with words/phrases of the theme before adding the random letters. -- David Smallberg, das@ucla-cs.ARPA, {ihnp4,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!das