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Winner of French Scrabble Title Does Not Speak French (2015)
- aj7 6y agoWhat Scrabble degenerates into.
- justwalt 6y agoMany enjoyable games become quite a bit different when they’re played at a high level. Whether or not the game is still enjoyable at that point is not always easy to say. I definitely would not enjoy memorizing lists of words in order to be more competitive.
- kebman 6y agoBack when I worked in sales, there was a guy on my sales team that would have the entire Norwegian Top 40 billboard memorized since its inception in the 50's, complete with producers and writers of lyrics. While a bit socially awkward, he still did alright at sales by following the script. So by that token he was regarded by my collegues as a bit of a savant. "Lest you suspect," also makes for quite unusual language in the article, btw. Haven't seen that in many modern news articles, at least. But strangely this rather archaic phrase seems to be more common in modern American litterature than in British literature. Together with the verbal addition of "I would think" at the end of that quote in the start, the article takes on a rather rustic feel.
- asveikau 6y ago> But strangely this rather archaic phrase seems to be more common in modern American litterature than in British literature. There is an interesting phenomenon I've read about where distant colonies, kept isolated from where their language originated, end up sounding more archaic than their home territory. The act of crossing an ocean can serve as a linguistic time capsule and changes made in the homeland don't always propagate. I've heard this claimed about a few languages: * Quebec French vs. France. (true to the form of TFA I do not speak French, so I cannot assess this claim.) * Judaeo-Spanish spoken by expelled Jewish communities vs. Spain. (from what I recall of recordings of the former it did seem like it lacks some phonetic changes that Spain had around the 15th-16th centuries, like [ʒ] and [ʃ] moving to [x], loss of initial /f/ in words like hijo, hablar ... and consequently generally has this almost Portuguese-sounding feel to it. Interestingly these same phonetic changes made it across to Latin American colonies but not to expelled Spanish Jews in Europe) * American English vs. England. (I've heard this claimed variously, as if to say that Shakespeare spoke with one of today's American accents, and frankly that sounds kind of dubious. But there may be bits and pieces of American English that sound old fashioned across the pond.)
- kibwen 6y ago> as if to say that Shakespeare spoke with one of today's American accents, and frankly that sounds kind of dubious To suggest that Shakespeare spoke with an American accent would be silly, but it is true that the non-rhotic "r" didn't become widespread until after Shakespeare's time, starting as a marker of prestige among the British upper classes in the mid-1700s (and spreading to the wannabe-aristocracy in the colonies, hence the stereotypical accent of the American Southern plantation owner). If the pronunciation of words like "car" is how one distinguishes British from American, then I suppose yes, Shakespeare would sound a bit less British than you might expect. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English
- asveikau 6y agoSure, but for non rhotic accents you have outliers in the States such as New York or Boston or parts of the South. There are youtube videos of attempted reconstructed Shakespearean accents. To my (american) ear it kind of sounds more like rhotic England.
- DFHippie 6y agoTo complicate things a little, the non-rhotic accents of the eastern seaboard of North America aren't generally considered posh: Southie, Mainer, Brooklyn. Newfoundland is the region of North American longest settled by English speakers, I believe. Google "Newfie accent" to hear true Shakespearean English.
- stan_rogers 6y agoNewfanese is pretty much crystallized Hiberno-English, at least if we're talking the language of the bay wops rather than townies. It has a surprising amount of commonality with African-American vernacular, likely due to transportation and indenture (which is why AAVE, while distinct, barely edges into typical creole patterns). The English of Shakespeare's time, or at least of his plays, has been largely reconstructed by linguist David Crystal, whose son, the actor and director Ben Crystal, is probably the best-known practitioner. There are a number of videos on YouTube of Ben doing Shakespeare in OP. A good starting point is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s - and if one had to tie it closely to a modern regional variant, it would be West Country. But that would just be something it would remind you of rather than a template.
- DFHippie 6y agoWhat I like about "lest" is that it demonstrates that the present subjunctive as a grammatical category is not quite dead yet in English. A native speaker of English knows that "lest it seem" is right and "lest it seems" is wrong, generally without ever having been taught this or knowing what to call this distinction. The so-called past subjunctive is more easily found, though it's losing its distinctive form (there's only one). People say "if I was" instead of "if I am" when they're describing a present contrary-to-fact state -- "If I was rich, I'd buy a Tesla". You can see that this is a past subjunctive, not a simple past, because it isn't past at all but present and contrary to fact. So English still retains the subjunctive! Yay!
- Zach_the_Lizard 6y agoAs an American, I'd say "If I were rich" rather than "If I was rich." Though in the Southern accents I've been around for much of my life, "If I was" was more common.
- stan_rogers 6y agoPerhaps it's because I'm old, or because I'm Canadian, but I would expect "if I were".
- DFHippie 6y agoThat's the single distinctive past subjunctive form I alluded to. I say "if I were rich" myself, but I'm used to hearing the other.
- hartator 6y agoI wonder if that give him any advantage learning actual French or if this so different area of the brain that actually doesn’t matter.
- claudeganon 6y agoHe memorized the French scrabble dictionary, so I doubt it’s in any way useful. He doesn’t know the meaning of any of the terms.
- echelon 6y agoHis brain is now wired with the space of possible spellings and phonemes. That can't have a nonzero impact on learning. He might have a jump on pattern recognition for conjugation, for instance.
- LudwigNagasena 6y agoI don’t think it’s allowed to conjugate verbs in Scrabble.
- cdavid 6y agoI don't think that's true, though I am not a player (only played very casually as a kid w/ my grand parents): https://www.fisf.net/scrabble/decouverte-du-scrabble/r%C3%A8gles-du-jeu.html https://www.fisf.net/scrabble/decouverte-du-scrabble/r%C3%A8... (French, sorry) I don't know how usable French conjugates are in scrabble, though. Intuitively, it should help placing high score letters like z, which is otherwise uncommon in French.
- user5994461 6y agoConjugates are super easy to use. Every verb can generate 50 different words, mostly with subtle variations in ending -e -es -ez -ent / -ai -ais -ait -aient. Playing a verb immediately allows the opponent to play an extension on it and make more points than you. This is a total game changer. I honestly think scrabble in French is a different game as in English. I'd rather see an article explaining the rules of the championship and how French scrabble is alien to what people think of scrabble.
- pinewurst 6y ago(2015)
- alex_young 6y agoThank you. I was just telling my friend about this and she insisted this happens every few years. That didn’t seem likely, and your comment helped us figure out that we’d actually talked about this years ago :)
- dtparr 6y agoWell, per this same winner's Wikipedia page, he's won several times since 2015, so it may indeed be that you've discussed it multiple times for separate events.
- disown 6y agoIt's likely you guys talked about it twice. "He competed in the French Championship and won his second Classique Championship" (2018) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_player) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_playe... There was even a brief HN comment thread about it 2 years ago. "Fun fact: the current top player of French scrabble is from New Zealand and doesn’t speak a word of French. He just memorized all ~200k valid words in the OSD." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18689565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18689565
- ricksharp 6y agoI’m getting to the age where that seems to happen often. On the positive side, I think I have figured out a sequence of all my favorite tv series in a loop that should last me for the rest of my life.
- zacwest 6y agoIf you're interested in watching competitive Scrabble, the NASPA YouTube channel recently did a virtual Tournament of Champions: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhvDB0pE-3ptFJBqemMOhxe3Z625OUbDY https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhvDB0pE-3ptFJBqemMOh...
- walrus01 6y agoMemorizing an entire dictionary is kind of like the cases I've read about with persons whose native language isn't arabic, but have successfully memorized and can recite verbally the entire Quran.
- zakki 6y agoIn Indonesia it is more on learning on recognizing Arabic letters, write it and spell it. For Quran also learning the tajwid (تجويد). I want to say that it is not memorizing the entire dictionary. Off course it raises new problem, they can recite Quran but not understanding much the meaning unless they read the translation.
- vxNsr 6y agoThis true for many Jewish kids as well. We can read, and write in Hebrew but have no idea what it means without a translation.
- samatman 6y agoTrue, but less so. I've learned a couple alphabets, Hebrew among them, just for fun. I'm pretty confident I could learn to recite the Quran with a month of steady practice. But memorize the whole thing? Like, name a sura, and I'm off to the races? That's very impressive. And without any understanding of the underlying words! That's even more impressive, but my heart sinks a little at the waste of human potential which it represents. Perhaps they're right, and they earn a lifetime in Paradise for their trouble. I can't help but thinking there are better ways to spend ones youth.
- danielheath 6y agoI mean, if they’re right it seems like a pretty good trade.
- smabie 6y agoJust do it when you're old. More efficient that way.
- Khelavaster 6y agoFrom 2015..
- Khelavaster 6y agoIn 2015..
- 11001001011010 6y agoIndeed memory, the point where computers totally outsmart us all. That's why traditional school where you get to the next grade by showing off your memory is totally deprecated. It might be me, but these kind of contests and our excitement about it only shows our stupidity even more. Our specialty is very fortunately not memory, it should never be. We are incredibly special creatures with much more interesting capabilities.
- nickelpro 6y agoMachines can also throw javelins and shots farther than any human can ever hope to. Hydraulics can trivially lift more than any strong man. A large enough spring can outperform any long jumper. More directly relatable, chess engines have been outperforming the grand masters for a decade now. That a machine can outperform a human doesn't make a human doing it unimpressive. The excitement and fun of the competition remains.
- wozniacki 6y agoBut games like Scrabble seem even more pointless than the Spelling bee which is in itself pointless ( making a competition out of memorizing or constructing from memory similar rooted words that one would barely use in any but the most scholarly of arcane academia or in the practice of law, is anything but useful or worthy of one's time ). A more worthwhile competition would test the participants on their reasoning / logic and turn it into an engaging game. Even gamifying brevity of language is a worthwhile pursuit since so many of todays youth speak so poorly or struggle expressing their thoughts in a coherent and curt manner. Scrabble and Spelling Bee encourage rote learning and little beyond that. A terrible waste of potential like OP alluded to. Memorizing and parroting, needless to say, is just not a very good use of the human intellect. Its really bad form and speak to the vanity and vainness of the organizers and contestants to have these silly competitions in this day and age.
- DFHippie 6y agoI've always been embarrassed that spelling bees are a thing in English. It's interesting that you can see the etymology of a word in its spelling, but horrific spelling sure is a barrier to literacy. How do you pronounce "lough"? How about "rough" or "dough"? And "plough"? Now try "hiccough". I envy Finnish kids. They've already mastered the grammar and are well on their way with the vocabulary. Spelling is barely a speed bump. English speakers have national competitions to demonstrate that they've mastered spelling.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mongol 6y agoThe Wikipedia page of this fellow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_player) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_playe...
- komali2 6y agoIIRC this person was interviewed for "Ultra learning," which reminds me I need to read that book still.
- slyall 6y agoUltralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career by Scott Young https://www.amazon.com/Ultralearning-Master-Outsmart-Competition-Accelerate/dp/006285268X https://www.amazon.com/Ultralearning-Master-Outsmart-Competi...
- kregasaurusrex 6y agoScrabble is largely a game of area-based combinatorics, which rewards finding sequences of letters that happen to be words and fit into the board's multiplier spaces. Memorizing the two-letter word list is extraordinarily helpful when playing competitively because it allows for playing a tighter game that doesn't resemble words commonly used in English.
- TwoBit 6y agoMakes me wonder if he could have won while knowing only a fraction of the French dictionary.
- nippoo 6y agoI was at the World Scrabble Championships in Prague a few years ago (with Nigel Richards). The amazing thing was how many of the highest-level Scrabble players were Thai and spoke barely any English. There are about 200,000 words in the Scrabble dictionary and and an average English speaker only knows 40,000. So knowing the language doesn't give a huge advantage, and all competitors end up spending years memorising word lists with no definitions - at a high level it's basically just a combinatorics game. The majority of the English-speaking competitors were mathematicians / scientists, rather than linguists for similar reasons. This sometimes has amusing repercussions - the world no 2 at the time, who was Thai, played the word "hetairas" and then challenged the word "twigs"...
- peteretep 6y agoOn Thais and Scrabble: https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/special-reports/1024881/thais-master-scrabble-without-english https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/special-reports/1024881...
- nostromo95 6y agoHonestly knowing just the spellings and not the meanings / useage contexts behind the words strikes me as an advantage since you’re as likely to weight “obscure” words as common words in your internal search algorithm. Knowing the language I feel must bias you.
- Waterluvian 6y agoExactly what I was thinking. My brain works against me when I’m trying to recall obscure words that fit a pattern when making a limerick or whatnot.
- furyofantares 6y ago> internal search algorithm A cool thing you can do is memorize the words two ways, how it's spelled and also with the letters rearranged alphabetically. That way when you arrange your tiles alphabetically you can just see all the words you've memorized this way that you have or are close to.
- zzo38computer 6y agoYou can play Scrabble without knowing how to speak the language, or what the grammar is, or what any of the words mean; you only need to know how to spell the words of that language (or least the ones which are permitted in Scrabble).
- United857 6y agoSimilarly, a lot of Chinese students do surprisingly well in the verbal section of US admissions exams like the SAT and GRE, despite being non-native speakers. They just memorize long lists of obscure English words that would rarely ever be used in practice.
- jgr0 6y agoNot sure if this is a good comparison. For SAT, GRE you need to know a word innately, be able to use it in a proper context, understand homonyms, distinguish between similar words and know which one to use in the given prompt etc. Yes, this does involve remembering long lists of words, but there is a lot of context and I would consider this proper language learning. It is vastly different from the memorization referred to in the article.
- loxs 6y agoFrom my experience as an English language student (non-native), I disagree to some extent. Taking (and learning) the SAT is quite a different experience than learning the language. It seems that people who are good at "taking tests" excel at it and this does not correlate completely with their ability to use the language. Of course often they ALSO learn the language (by other means), but I know people who successfully took the SAT in order to participate in student exchange programs and when they go to the USA they realize that they are quite poor at English and tend to stick to ethnic communities, because they are not comfortable to use the language at a higher level. On the other hand, if you study for the SAT when you already know the language, it seems to indeed improve your English a lot.
- jgr0 6y agoOk, my experience is with GRE, and my assumption was that SAT would be something similar. For GRE, to get a good score (85+ percentile) you need to score really well in the comprehension section, which has a significant weightage. It requires considerable command over English vocabulary, its idiomatic usage, and of course along with other things like logical thinking, keen observation etc. Merely remembering word lists without understanding its contextual usage would only get you so far. Definitely not the kind of success exhibited in the article.
- cm2012 6y agoI would find a scrabble tournament a lot more interesting if it limited it to the top 10k most common english words.
- feralimal 6y agoImagine memorising the best part of 200,000 words in a foreign language in order to win a game of scrabble! And not being able to string a sentence together in that language! Some people have waaaaayyyy too much time on their hands!
- feralimal 6y agoI'm being downvoted for that?! Seriously, can you tell me a more useless way of spending your time??
- jobigoud 6y agoMany sports & activities feel like this at high level. An athlete will train everyday and build muscle memory in order to jump over a bar placed as high as possible. A chess player, a football player, etc. Highly specialized skills that are of no use in day to day life. The collateral benefits like fitness or entertainment value can also be found here.
- maest 6y agoAnalogous to this: GPT-3 doesn't speak English.
- abnry 6y agoThis makes sense when you realize Scrabble isn't a word game, it is a board control game.
- apricot 6y agoIs this Duplicate Scrabble (all contestants playing the same letters)? If so, I imagine computers reached perfect play long ago, as it seems to involve nothing beyond memorizing huge lists of numbers and searching the board for the best place to put them. But what about regular Scrabble? Sometimes, the best play is not the word that's worth the most points, because it might give your opponent a chance to make a big play (the simplest example is refraining to play a high-value word that opens a triple score square for your opponent). The best play depends on the probabilities of your opponent holding, now or in the future, certain letters, and you can make a probabilistic model of that based on the letters that are in play at any moment. Perfect play seems to involve a lot of computation. What's the state of the art on this?
- cainxinth 6y agoTwo documentaries about word games came out at similar times. “Word Wars” (2004) was about Scrabble and “Wordplay” (2006) was about crosswords. Both are excellent films about high-level play in these games. After watching them, what struck me was that the best Scrabble players were all, shall I say, a bit weirder than the best crossword players. Crossword requires a large general fund of knowledge. Scrabble only requires rote memorization. Crossword attracted well-rounded people. Top Scrabblers were monomaniacs.