17 Responses for "Crossword puzzle"

1. lukas February 28th, 2009 at 6:45 pm

   I don’t think ch and ll are considered single letters in Spanish any more. Anyway, in Spanish language crosswords I have only ever seen them spread across two boxes.

2. Philip TAYLOR March 1st, 2009 at 4:28 pm

   Well, Daniels and Bright (1996) agree with Graham : they define Hankul as “a phonemically based alphabet”; Taylor (1979), on the other hand, calls it an “alphabetic syllabary”.

   Daniels, Peter & Bright, William (1996) : The World’s Writing Systems, Oxford University Press.

   Taylor, Insup (1979) : “The Korean Writing System : An Alphabet ? A Syllabary ?”, in Processing of Visible Languages 2, eds Paul A Kolers, Merald E Wrolstad and Herman Bouma. New York : Plenum.

3. Garic March 2nd, 2009 at 12:33 pm

   In Welsh crosswords, ch and ll occupy a single box each, so the word for small, “bach”, would take up three boxes, not four; the same is true of dd, ff, ng, ph, rh, and th (although, as ph only occurs as a result of initial-consonant mutation, it’s unlikely to be ever written in a crossword).

4. Harry March 3rd, 2009 at 2:00 am

   Welsh seems to follow through the logic of the digraph=single-letter idea much more consistently than Spanish (even before they stopped doing it at least ten years ago). However, the wacky alphabetisation thing is a nuisance, and not as straightforward as you might think either, since NG is not always a letter but sometimes the conjunction of a (morphologically separate) N and G, which might be pronounced separately in careful speech (just as in English “ng” can represent either /ŋ/ or /ng~/ŋg/), or then again might not. I wonder if one day Welsh will cave in and abandon this charming but essentially pointless convention.

5. Philip TAYLOR March 3rd, 2009 at 3:08 pm

   What of Nederlands (Dutch) ? Does the “ij” ligature occupy one cell or two, does anyone know ?

6. Andrej Bjelakovic March 7th, 2009 at 12:58 am

   In Serbian Latin alphabet there are two digraphs – lj and nj (they represent the palatal lateral aproximant and palatal nasal, respectively), and they are both written in the same box in crosswords.
   Also, when it comes to vertical shop signs etc. in those cases the two letters are written side by side.

7. Athel Cornish-Bowden March 12th, 2009 at 7:04 pm

   “as an example, lomo comes before llegar in a list of Spanish words”

   As a more telling example (because the same words with the same spelling occur in both English and Spanish, and they often occur together in the same list), an alphabetical listing of South American countries will put Colombia before Chile if it’s in Spanish, but Chile before Colombia if it’s in English.

   We are not entirely free from such anomalies in English: standard practice in the UK, but not, I think in the USA, is to treat surname beginning Mc or M’ as if they were written Mac. So, in an index I have in front of me I see Ma, McBane, McElhaney, MacFarlane and McKay appeariing in that order.

   Lukas: “I don’t think ch and ll are considered single letters in Spanish any more”. Although that is theoretically true, I don’t see much sign of it having a practical effect yet (any more than I see the disappearance of all the circumflexes that were abolished in French about 20 years ago.) Incidentally that doesn’t affect Spanish crosswords, which already put C H and L L in separate boxes before the reform.

8. Nigel Greenwood March 16th, 2009 at 11:39 pm

   And now for a really abstruse question … Do Catalan crosswords distinguish between LL and L.L?

9. Philip TAYLOR March 17th, 2009 at 9:17 pm

   It may be possible to find out online. According to JSTOR, “La Vanguardia is one of the first online papers to feature an interactive crossword puzzle, in both Spanish and Catalan.”

   La Vanguardia is at http://www.lavanguardia.es/

10. Philip TAYLOR March 17th, 2009 at 11:53 pm

    A Catalan-speaking friend has helped me to track down the on-line Catalan crucigrama. at http://pasatiempos.lavanguardia.es/juego-crucigramas.asp

11. Graham March 18th, 2009 at 1:51 pm

    Unfortunately, that page only seems to have a Castilian crossword – unless I’m missing something.

12. Philip TAYLOR March 18th, 2009 at 6:46 pm

    Oops : OK, I’ve asked Warren (my Catalan-speaking friend) to check …

13. Athel Cornish-Bowden March 18th, 2009 at 7:33 pm

    You can find crosswords in Catalan at http://crucigramaexpres.cat/crucigrames/

    I haven’t found any with words in l.l (at least, not words that I’m sure have l.l), but quite a few with words in ll, such as “nivell”, and such words always have the LL in two boxes. See for example http://crucigramaexpres.cat/crucigrames/simbolic12×13solucio.html

    (My guess is that the contents of this URL change, so it may be different after today.)

14. Philip TAYLOR March 18th, 2009 at 10:28 pm

    Sorry, Warren now reports : “There is only Castilian.

    LaVanguardia has a Google-translated-to-Catalan site but I get only error messages from the crosswords.”

    That will teach me to believe JSTOR !

15. Graham March 19th, 2009 at 10:25 am

    I see from his blog on Tuesday 17 March 2009 (http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2009/03/going-up.html) that John Wells agrees with me – the Korean writing system is alphabetic.

16. gd April 20th, 2009 at 12:07 pm

    Dutch ij normally occupies a single cell in crosswords. In fact, it is not uncommon for Dutch crosswords to merge ij with y, allowing ‘hobby’ to share one cell with ‘dijk’. Also the solution would be published all-caps using Y for both Y and IJ. This helps in aligning text-based solutions.
    ____D
    HOBBY
    ____K

17. André Stryger April 20th, 2009 at 6:38 pm

    Norwegian officially replaced aa with å in 1917 and Danish did the same in 1948. Since then, aa is only retained in some surnames, and would use two crossword boxes.