Bilingual Scrabble ... one of which is Welsh, including how to make trousers out of a hole.11/9/2016 Yep, Bilingual Scrabble is the perfect resort of the divided household. One player uses the Language A Scrabble tiles, the other uses the Language B tiles ..... it works surprisingly well ..... here's the start of a game between the ubiquitous Cerys Matthews and the equally ubiquitous Emmanuelle Monet ... here we go .... Cerys has played the uncontroversial SM'd word for water .... us learners are allowed to use SM'd words ..after all, we've got to learn them. And if we can do it, so can CM. Also, ddwr should really be ddŵr but we don't "do" accents in Scrabble. Good old Emmanuelle ,being French, has made the word trou (a hole) .Straight away you see two of the challenges of bilingual Scrabble... firstly, she won't know what you can add on to ddwr ... and she'll have trouble using that dd if she wants to. Especially in French. If she was using English, she could incorporate the DD into toddy or cuddle ... also, she could turn trou into trout or even trousers .Neat. Back to Cerys, who has done the excellent tlws. By the way, throughout the opening stages of this game they were plagued with far too many low-scoring tiles. It happens. Whether Cerys knew enough French to have realised that the S could have been bunged on the end of trou we will never know. Already we are seeing the tactical possibilities and limitations of the bilingual game. Now ( see below) EM has played gens ( people). Not very exciting really. .. but her letters were rubbish. Next play now ..... after EM's insipid attempt Cerys hits back with "hen" at which point EM complains that she has put down an English word. This is another facet of the bilingual game ... so few people know any Welsh. EM is very suspicious when CM tells her it's Welsh for "old" and eventually has to get out the dictionary to prove her point. Now EM cleverly uses CM's "hen" to make " chene" ... the French word for an oak tree. In bilingual Scrabble you are allowed to change a Welsh word into a French one.Yes, I know it should have a little hat over the first "e" but [a] we don't do accents in Scrabble as mentioned above and [b] for some odd reason the computer has now decided not to let me type accents ... when I do, it dumps everything back to the desktop. Humph. Now CM plays "dyddiau" which EM grudgingly accepts. With far more possibilities on the board now, they both turned their attention to the top. EM figured that she would be pretty safe with jeune ( young) and then CM put down the esoteric "thus" which again was challenged as another English word by the by now grumpy and distinctly irked EM. Again, the dictionary had to be produced yet again to demonstrate that is meant " frankincense" in Welsh. Play now switched to the bottom again, with Ms Monet getting duvet ( fluff, down) and then Cerys cashing in with the excellent cacen ! Bit of a risk with the triple-word possibilities. After EM had played "facil"( easy) onto the triple-word corner square, the board was like this .... notice that she has got away with spelling it wrongly, which is another advantage (?) of bilingual Scrabble... they often won't spot that sort of thing.She's done it it the Spanish way. Cerys's 7 Welsh tiles are on the left, and Emmanuelle's 7 French tiles are on the right. It's Cerys to play now .... what would you do? Well, I hope you all enjoyed that little insight into the bilingual game, including the opportunities to cheat. But now it's yet another song from one of the many bands/people featured in that book about Sain Records .... it's that Edward H again, this time with "pishyn", a word you won't find in many dictionaries. Luckily however, not only is this a words video, it's also translated pishyn for you.
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Next week on Radio 3 from Monday 14th to Friday 18th each evening at 10:45 pm there's going to be a series of 5 programmes about the Mabinogion. Here's the details, night by night .... I wonder if they'll mention that Mabinsglodion version of it that I wrote about a mere 23 posts ago ? Probably a bit too controversial for R3. Well, I hope you'll all be tuning in. Remember to switch on early to let the valves warm up. Meanwhile, I'm getting back to that thing where I played you songs by some of the people featured in that book about Sain Records... here's Edward H. with " Y Fro" . Notice especially at 2m 11s the strange " coal-mining" dance by the two people on the shoulders of two other unfortunate people in the audience. All over the world anthropologists have been able to detect hidden and long-forgotten ways of life by studying their remnants in the folk-dances of the indigenous people. Not that you'd find out anything about that by reading the Mabinogion of course. But here, in this simple video, we see it in action. Just read Riddley Walker and you'll see it all in the Eusa Show and Pictures in the Wind and the Farring Secret Try and the Spare the Mending. you know you want to.... Here's a good link to what I was talking about up there .... the Eusa Show ac ati ...
www.ocelotfactory.com/hoban/cowart1.html Here's yesterday's game of Welsh Clabbers between Cerys Matthews and Max Boyce ,but much later on. If you want to know what the hell is going on, go back to the previous post and all will be clear.(-ish) So .... questions .. [1] What are all those extra words really ? [2] If it was Cerys ( left) to move, what should she do ? [3] If it was Max ( right) to go, what would his best move be? Now some music.. the very first song I ever put on here ... Cate le Bon with "O Am Gariad" .... Hey ... you can sing along to it these days with this handy words video .... |
Author I'm 376 years old,104 metres tall and own 54 pairs of binoculars. Apart from that, I'm pretty normal. Archives
October 2019
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