What 74 Years of Crossword History Says About the Language We Use | Hacker News Reader

What 74 Years of Crossword History Says About the Language We Use

nytimes.com

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I wrote a mini NYT crossword search engine many years ago (only covers 1996 to 2011).

http://donohoe.io/projects/crossword/#/hacker

Its funny to see how terms changed over the years. A few interesting ones:

http://donohoe.io/projects/crossword/#/aol

http://donohoe.io/projects/crossword/#/google

http://donohoe.io/projects/crossword/#/facebook

Very cool site!

A few I liked:

http://donohoe.io/projects/crossword/#/router

http://donohoe.io/projects/crossword/#/mci

http://donohoe.io/projects/crossword/#/streaming

Thanks for sharing.

Alternatively: What 74 Years of Crossword History says about the New York Times.

I am not dismissing the observation, but I think other factors have to be taken into account.

> I think other factors have to be taken into account.

I would put forward what we consider an appropriate education as one of those factors.

Or what it says about the specific subset of words that are used in crossword puzzles. I find this article very interesting because it does outline some general trends in language usage (the migration in foreign language words, for example), but one could also draw the conclusion that Ulee's Gold is America's favorite movie from crosswords.

Maybe this already exists but I could see crosswords, etc (ex, Jeopardy-like A&Qs), being used as a learning tool for things like geography and history, allowing students to mentally visualize subject-specific associations (ie, including backwards and sideways) rather than just memorize first-this-then-that type facts.

One could throw in identical problems here and there, either stated exactly the same way or differently, in order to create spaced-repition learning, as well as an inside-out understanding of the subject.

To give a random example - US geography, and if the student enjoys it or does well, let them continue on with it and grade them on the successive tests for State-specific or foreign country geography, for example. Throw in historical changes to make it multidisciplinary. In other words, let students explore their interests within the larger subject, rather than standardizing everything for everyone.

______

The Crossword article and the article link that follows, on Horizontal History, inspired my comment. http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html

It's heartening to hear you think it's a good idea, because I actually run a foreign languages learning site which uses bilingual crosswords for vocabulary memorization, and until now it has experienced an extremely lukewarm reception from teachers. Well, I had a hunch this kind of learning puzzles were a better fit for autodidacts anyway.

If you care to check the site, its URL is http://panagrama.org

Comments very much welcome!

(And as this is HN, I should also mention that the crosswords are written in BiwaScheme.)

EDIT: mistyped URL

Uber (a car service) is no longer clued as a German preposition (over or above)

Perhaps because it isn't? The latter is written with an umlaut.

(Note that umlauts can actually be a distinguishing factor for very different meanings, e.g., "schwül"->humid vs "schwul"->gay. In the case of "uber", there is simply no such word in the German language; the preposition is "über".)

(Note also that in cases of typed German where there is not umlaut key available, the standard way to transcribe is to insert an "e" after the vowel. So you would write "ueber" for the German preposition.)

New York Times crosswords use the 26 letters of the American alphabet. Accents and other letter modifications are stripped out of answers.

This is not strictly true, Thursday puzzles (and sometimes Sundays) often have boxes where you need to put in multiple letters, whole words, numbers, or other trickery.

How would a word that contains the German s-ligature "ß" be written?

Are there actually any words like that that have made their way into English?

yes, ueber became uber.

That does have the 'ß' character in it, though, which is what I was asking about.

One possibility is the unit "gauss" (which, like the person, is Gauß in German).

I was trying to figure out whether the spelling "Delikateßen" was ever standard (it would have been "-essen" even before the spelling reform, I think). I found some old books with a Google search that did use that form, but I don't know if it was ever standard or was a variant spelling.

Words in the category "English terms derived from German" on Wiktionary[1] that contain "ss" instead of "ß":

ahlspiess, edelweiss, Federweisser, frass, Preussen, stoss, sussreserve, weissbier, weisswurst

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_derive...

I've typically seen that transliterated as 'ss'. For instance, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss

By the new German spelling, "Schloss" is written with two s, since the o is short. In the old spelling, it was written "Schloß".

On the other hand, for "Straße" the new spelling does not change the ß to ss, since the a is long.

The best possible way to handle the ß is not transcribing it. In crossword puzzles it is transcribed as ss. In general, it is discussed whether one should rather transcribe ß as ss or sz (since ß is originally a sz ligature).

no one transcribes ß as sz. It's always transcribed as ss

That is simply not correct. Indeed the ss transcription is much more common, but also the sz transcription is used:

> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9F#Ersetzung_und_.C3.A4hnl...

"Kann das Zeichen „ß“ nicht dargestellt werden, weil es in der verwendeten Schriftart oder dem Zeichensatz fehlt, so sollte es durch „ss“ ersetzt werden (aus „Straße“ wird „Strasse“). In den (behördlichen) Fernschreiben wurde das „ß“ bis in das frühe 21. Jahrhundert durch „sz“ ersetzt. Dies war unter anderem bei Familiennamen wichtig („Straßer“ wurde im Text zu „Straszer“)."

That's talking in the past, though. Which doesn't invalidate what I said

There are standard ways to write German when only the basic Latin/English alphabet is available, so "ss" for ß. Umluts get a following e: "ae" for ä.

See, for example, KDE dev Martin Gräßlin's domain: https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/about/

German crosswords use the same 26 letters. But the points of umlauts are not simply dropped, but have to be transcribed:

  ä -> ae
  ö -> oe
  ü -> ue

So simply dropping the points shows a clear lack of knowledge of German.

Most Americans do in fact lack knowledge of German.

But why are they so fond of German words, then?

Edit: And why don't they look up the transliteration rules before? I mean: I only know few words of Esperanto, but I know the transliteration rules for the letters in the Esperanto alphabet that are not ASCII characters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_orthography#ASCII_tr...

We like their food, and we are never squeamish about culturally appropriating any tasty food or food terms or language in general. Everyone loves tacos, no matter their feelings on illegal immigration or whatever.

Also see ancestry, there are 50M people of German ancestry in the USA, and only 80M people of Germany ancestry in Germany itself. We're a big enough fraction of the total that if we feel like changing language rules, we have enough people to make it stick, at least as a weird local dialect.

Changing letters without first trying to understand why they are there in German (the same holds for my Esperanto example) simply shows that one is clearly not interested in the language/culture - in other words: An utter disrespect. On the other hand: Trying to understand, but simply failing is OK (yes, conjugating and declining words is quite ugly in German; even some Germans do it wrong).

> We're a big enough fraction of the total that if we feel like changing language rules, we have enough people to make it stick, at least as a weird local dialect.

To be able to challenge the language rules, you first have to understand them quite a bit. It is quite a difference between challenging language rules vs. simply not understanding them.

Trying to dictate how other people use their native language seems way more disrespectful than dropping diacritics when borrowing vocabulary.

Eh you have to understand that in dealing with loan words the goal isn't to produce cognates. It is a natural well established process in English, and pointedly doesn't carry over pronunciation or diacritics. This is so that the words text is freely interchangeable as there is a long period where the term is sometimes written with diacritics (and italicized) and sometimes not. über and ueber would seem different to people and risk confusing them.

I understand your concern, in German as in most languages words are being homogenized and losing diacritics, first among the youth and informal use, and then even sneaking in to ads and "real" use. It has caused a lot of concern, and a fair amount of pushback, but you can't expect other languages' systems to follow the reactionary rules or care about the internal politics.

To add one point: Already by the change from Fraktur to Antiqua in Germany in the middle of the 20th century lots of subtleties got lost. For example, the words Wachstube (which can either be read as Wach-stube or as Wachs-tube) are spelled differently in Fraktur (since there exists two kinds of s), but the same in Antiqua (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Wachstube.svg). Also some pairs of letters that form a common sound are indicated by a ligatur in Fraktur (as ch, ck, ſt and tz), but not in Antiqua (cf. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktursatz#Ligaturen_und_Tren...).

> we are never squeamish about culturally appropriating any tasty food or food terms or language in general.

Only if they're sufficiently Americanized (c.f. (a) the kind of Chinese food you get in this country and (b) Anglophones getting really fussy about sportscasters pronouncing Hispanic names using Spanish vowels)

Yes, but English often drops diacritics when borrowing words from other languages. So "café" became "cafe". The English rules around anglicization of imported words makes fidelity to the originating language's spelling/pronunciation optional.

Sometimes this has led to the same word being imported more than once. English imported "hostel" from French, and then after "hostel" become "hôtel", English imported it again as "hotel".

This is generally true, but I found one counterexample in borrowing from German: loess, in geology, from German Löss. Maybe this was a particularly educated borrowing or one initiated by a fluent German speaker, or maybe it would have been especially confusing to call the material "loss"?

German crosswords use the 26 letters, too, but write ueber.

That comparison and its respective graph seem a bit meaningless. Of course

Of course the use of the German proposition as a hint has decreased -- I would think the clue "car service" is being used with greater frequency these days

Yes, not only meanings but also pronuntiation.

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