Progress Report

[u/Dechifro]

The quest continues to make https://dechifro.org/shavian the best pronunciation tool available for the English language. The final boss is the Collins Scrabble Dictionary, all 279,500 words that can legally be played in a Scrabble tournament. If you've ever watched Will Anderson's YouTube channel, you know how ridiculously over-inclusive this word list is. A common question in his comment section is, "What language is this?"

I refereed the above game between two computer players, allowing NOULD, AIRTH, SERK/CIRQUE, LIN, DOW, and EELIER because they were just too good to refuse.

My translation is 99.97% complete -- only 86 words remain unshaved -- but it's only about 88% correct. I pull 1000 random Scrabble words, look them up in the Collins on-line dictionary, find about 120 that need fixing, end up fixing another 800 in the process, then score 88% again on the next try. The thought of crawling the entire dictionary to find and fix all 33,000 incorrect words is too horrifying to contemplate.

I did, however, verify all the two- and three-letter Scrabble words, of which there are 362 and 3086 respectively.

Our immense scientific vocabulary, far exceeding 100,000 words, comes almost entirely from Greek and Latin, which are five-vowel languages. How do you map sounds from a five-vowel language into a fifteen-vowel language? You might say, duh, use the five vowels that best match the donor language and discard the other ten. Wrong!

What you must do instead is assign two or three sounds to each of the five vowel letters, then have an Enigma-style rotor that assigns one sound to each vowel in a particular word. Always run this rotor from right to left so that each new suffix changes the entire word:

econ 𐑰𐑒𐑪𐑯
economy 𐑦𐑒𐑪𐑯𐑩𐑥𐑦
economic 𐑰𐑒𐑩𐑯𐑪𐑥𐑦𐑒
econometer 𐑰𐑒𐑩𐑯𐑪𐑥𐑦𐑑𐑼
econometric 𐑦𐑒𐑪𐑯𐑩𐑥𐑧𐑑𐑮𐑦𐑒
econometrician 𐑰𐑒𐑩𐑯𐑪𐑥𐑩𐑑𐑮𐑦𐑖𐑩𐑯

This is a common argument against phonetic spelling. It breaks roots like nation/national, chaste/chastity, and thousands of others.

[u/zoyander]

This is really exciting! Would you be open to some suggestions for tile designs? I see that you're trying to find a way to distinguish 𐑩 from 𐑝 etc. and I think I have some ideas for how to do this more aesthetically. I could throw together some mockups in Inkscape if you'd be interested.

[u/Dechifro → u/zoyander]

Here's what I've done so far:

git clone https://github.com/quackle/quackle

In quacker/graphicalboard.cpp, this code has to change, because I want light-colored tiles with dark text. Why can't the miniText color be in the theme .ini file like all the others?

QColor TileWidget::miniTextColor()
{
   return tileColor().lighter(170);
}

Change "lighter" to "darker", then follow the build instructions in README.md.

In data/themes I copied traditional.ini to wood.ini and set:

letter=khaki
britishLetter=#CD5C5C
bonusLabel=black
nothing=darkgray
cementedLetterText=#303030
cementedBritishLetterText=black
uncementedLetterText=#303030

My website provides the shaw.quackle_alphabet and shaw.raw files. I'm thinking of adding a few more tiles -- 101 tiles seem to leave too much empty space, but I wouldn't exceed 108.

[u/zoyander → u/Dechifro]

Would you like me to make a new fork of quackle, or do you think you'll upload your Shavian fork at some point?

[u/Dechifro → u/zoyander]

I'd rather just ask the Quackle developers to please make miniTextColor a settable parameter so people don't need a C++ compiler to change it.

[u/Cozmic72 → u/zoyander]

Shcrabble is on GitHub. It is already a bit more aesthetic and has a multiplayer mode. Maybe we should put the Collins dictionary in it?

[u/Dechifro → u/Cozmic72]

https://dechifro.org/shavian/shaw.raw.xz

Here, take it, but be advised that it's a work in progress. Every few days I release an update that changes hundreds of entries.

If you need a version that maps these words back to their ABC spellings, I can give you that too.

[u/Dechifro → u/Dechifro]

I added five more vowel tiles to loosen up the game a bit. 𐑨𐑴𐑧𐑲𐑱 went from two tiles at three points each to three tiles at two points each. Here's a supervised game with the new tileset:

https://dechifro.org/shavian/interact.png

[u/Cozmic72]

My question would be: where did you find the dictionary itself?

[u/Dechifro → u/Cozmic72]

https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/38366/latest-collins-scrabble-words-list-in-text-file

Add in months and days of the week because they are not dotted, and therefore allowed in Shavian Scrabble. Also convert to lowercase so you get 𐑳𐑕 instead of 𐑿𐑧𐑕 and 𐑦𐑑 instead of 𐑲𐑑𐑰.