3 ms·
Elite Scrabble players look at the language differently than speakers. For example you need to know words with 'Q' but no 'U'. Not something that comes up in
by ape4 7y ago
Elite Scrabble players look at the language differently than speakers. For example you need to know
words with 'Q' but no 'U'. Not something that comes up in everyday speech.
https://scrabblewordfinder.org/scrabble-words-with/q/and-no/u https://scrabblewordfinder.org/scrabble-words-with/q/and-no/...
- yifanl 7y agoI could probably be convinced that not having any natural-preconceptions of the language actually leads to better performance in Scrabble: you're only concerned about knowing all the high-value words, and not the words you'd use in conversation, which presumably isn't at all related.
- dghughes 7y agoTheir motives are qabalistic.
- boobsbr 7y agoI learned the word 'qanat' from Frank Herbert's Dune. And I thought 'faqir' was written with a K.
- schoen 7y agoThe middle consonant is a ق, which is the same consonant at the end of "Iraq", or Qur'an. There's been a tendency to write this with <q> in English more recently -- consider "Qur'an" vs. "Koran". The <k> version produces transliterations that may look more natural for English spelling, but there is another Arabic letter, ك, which is transliterated as <k>, so the <q> version helps distinguish the two.
- Mediterraneo10 7y agoThe borrowing of fakir into English is largely the result of British colonialism in India. While Persian (and the heavily Persianified variety Urdu) was an important court language in NW India, and the word would have been spelled with ق in the native script, the word had passed from Persian via Urdu to Hindustani in general, which lacks a phoneme /q/, and so its unvoiced velar stop is reflected as k in English spelling regardless.