[net.nlang] Crossword puzzles

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.

-- 

Ted Hopp	{seismo,umcp-cs}!nbs-amrf!hopp

hopp@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!hopp

matt@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

grass@uiucdcsb.UUCP (01/30/85)

<>
I've seen Russian crossword puzzles too.  They tend to be not quite as dense
as English ones (meaning that there are more spaces that do not contain letters)

Russian newspapers frequently have them.  I think I've seen them in Czech and
Serbo-Croatian as well.
	- Judy Grass,  University of Illinois - Urbana
	  {ihnp4,pur-ee,convex}!uiucdcs!grass   grass%uiuc@csnet-relay.arpa

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