Shabdle: Wordle in Hindi
kach.github.io
kach.github.io
I found this arrangement fascinating. Unlike the jumble of letters that is the Latin alphabet.
Note the "g" here is like that in "gum" and not "gin"
Here's a good explanation from Richard Salomon (2003), "Writing Systems of the Indo-Aryan Languages". Note the startling suggestion that this arrangement might have been systematized even before the advent of writing!
> In this system, usually referred to as varṇamālā ‘garland of letters’, the characters are divided into vowels (svara) and consonants (vyañjana), and each major set is further divided into subgroups, again on phonetic principles. Thus the vowels are subdivided into simple vowels and diphthongs, each set up as short/long pairs (a-ā-i-ī-u-ū, etc.), while the consonants are classified into the groups vargīya (comprising stops, sparśa, including nasals, anunāsika), antaḥstha (semivowels), and ūṣman (spirants, including ha). Within each consonant subclass, the individual letters are arranged by place and manner of articulation. Thus the largest set, the twenty-five vargīyas, is divided into five sets (varga) of consonants with the same place of articulation, arranged from the back to the front of the mouth: kaṇṭhya ‘velar’, tālavya ‘palatal’, mūrdhanya ‘retroflex’ or ‘cerebral’, dantya ‘dental’ and oṣṭhya ‘labial’. Each varga contains five types of consonants: unvoiced unaspirated, unvoiced aspirated, voiced unaspirated, voiced aspirated and nasal. This system may have originally been developed in a tradition of linguistic analysis before the use of writing, and only subsequently been applied to the written form of language in Brāhmī script. The earliest written specimens of the are found in terracotta plaques of about the second century BC showing a schoolboy’s writing lessons (Salomon 1990:271).
The Korean script, invented much later, is also impressively phonetic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Consonants
Shows how much this language's usage in writing and reading has declined.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Alphabet_of_Sans...
I have personally set a standard or a set of rules for writing Hindi using English alphabets myself and I have seen my friends follow the same. We do not use such shortcuts/shortforms.
Hell, even "Acha" is not the correct way. It must be "Achha" (double Hs).
Twitter even does a good enough job of translating Hindi written in the Devnagri script. Doesn’t work if you use Latin script obviously.
Also, I'd just like to say that this take of Hindi Wordle is the best so far - fill in the व्यंजन (consonants) with the स्वर (vowels) supplied as hints.
Written word-games aren’t a thing in Hindi (like Hangman for eg) but we do have a lot of stuff rhyme based games. Probably other ways to tackle this better.
Interesting observation, and I can't help but wonder if this is loosely correlated to literacy. Since most of these games were developed to pass time by the masses, it only makes sense that they be verbal rather than written.
I would like someone to do an analysis of quantifying difficulty in terms of alphabet size, word size, and vocabulary size. Because I don't know what the actual difficulty here is vs the English or the Hindi version.
That would be first order analysis. Second order analysis would consider the structure of words in different languages, such as how often pairs of letters occur together etc.
The game won't highlight anything if your guess is not a valid word. So it was impossible for me to get any hint at all. I kept trying random letters and made over a hundred guesses but not a single yellow or green.
I think the author should fix this. If a selected letter occurs in any part of the answer, it should be highlighted even if the guess is not a valid word. That's the only reasonable way to make this work with Hindi.
1. Do not count words absent in word list, like original wordle.
2. Put a limit to guesses.
In Kannada, wordalla can be parsed in 2 ways -
wordalla => "word alla" == "not the word"
wordalla => "wordle uh?" == "Isn't this Wordle ?"
Like in wordle, all your guesses need to be valid dictionary words.
1 guesses: 503 players
2 guesses: 61 players
3 guesses: 17 players
4 guesses: 6 players
5 guesses: 7 players
6+ guesses: 29 players
Most people got it in one!
Shaabash!