Hey, thanks very much, that's the most enthusiastic response I've ever had regarding a localisation project :)
I forgot to mention that I have several dictionary files from my work over on Open/LibreOffice and Mozilla, so yes, that's not a big problem as long as I know what the upper word limit is. The place name issue is much less of a problem in Gaelic as a lot are composed of common nouns but good point, we'll have to do some cleaning.
You're right about the alphabet in the sense that apart from the grave accent, there are no "special characters". But the problem is this: Gaelic historically used a dot above consonants to show a shound change, for example c was /k/ but ċ was /x/ (like German ch). So these were, from the Gaelic point of view, single letters. At some point (I won't go into the reasons) the dot was replaced with an h. Because these sound changes are very common, that statistically makes h one of the most common letters. There's also another problem in that certain other combinations are seen as single units such as ll nn rr and ng.
We thought of Scrabble some years back but decided to go with something similar to Yahtzee but with letters to begin with. We tried the simple approach of using single letters but it just turned out to be very unwieldy. We either needed too many dice before we could make any decent words or we could make only very few words. But once we said, hey, let's just go with the way Gaelic thinks the letters are sorted, it worked a lot better and we found that with 7 dice, we could do a lot of words.
Not counting the "specials", Gaelic only uses 18 letters anyway, so it's either a b c d e f g h i l m n o p r s t u + à è ì ò ù (23) or a b bh c ch d dh e f fh g gh l ll m mh n nn ng o p ph r rr s sh t th u + à è ì ò ù (34, although we dropped fh and ph cause they're too rare)
As English has 26, that's only marginally more.
We could contemplate dropping the accented vowels but initially, I'd rather not. Minority languages are very sensitive to dropping stuff like that. But we can revisit that, if needs be.
PS: don't worry about having missed the link, I know Google is my friend ;)
Don't worry about the digraphs: This function has already been implemented for games in Spanish. And we have made tests with a Hungarian Dictionary and a Hungarian letter set, and of course, the digraphs are shown correctly, see attachment.
So of course we can use this function for Gaelic digraphs, too. I will explain to you tomorrow how it works!
Zitat von akerbeltzalba...that's not a big problem as long as I know what the upper word limit is.
The word count is limited by your RAM (or maybe 2GB). German dic has about 600k entries, several with paraphrase. It's size is about 10MB, loaded into the program in 2 or 3 seconds.
You can use all letters that are represented in unicode (selected font needs to be capable to display that letters). Non-unicode digraphs are supported as well. To insert such letter, add a section [Replace] into the dic and denote some unused signs with the text, e.g. 1=LL, 2=RR for Spanish. All LL and RR in the dic are to be replaced by these 1 and 2 respectively. Unfortunately I haven't translated the help on this topic for English but perhaps you can put two and two together with the German entry: http://scrabble.game-server.cc/wiki/inde...e_Dictionary/de.
Yes, he can! No problem at all! We have already chatted a little bit on Skype last night. Infact akerbeltzalba is German. But he has Gaelic friends who maybe want to read in our forum, too! So that's one of the reasons why he wrote in English!
I will tell akerbeltzalba everything so that he can start to work on Gaelic L10n and I18n!
Zitat von akerbeltzalbaNot counting the "specials", Gaelic only uses 18 letters anyway, so it's either a b c d e f g h i l m n o p r s t u + à è ì ò ù (23) or a b bh c ch d dh e f fh g gh l ll m mh n nn ng o p ph r rr s sh t th u + à è ì ò ù (34, although we dropped fh and ph cause they're too rare)
As English has 26, that's only marginally more.
We could contemplate dropping the accented vowels but initially, I'd rather not. Minority languages are very sensitive to dropping stuff like that. But we can revisit that, if needs be.
We should discuss which letter set would be more suitable for Gaelic Scrabble, the 23 common letters' set or the 34 letters' special set. Of course this has something to do with letter frequency in the Gaelic language.
What you told about the point and the h for ch is very interesting! I like to know such things, because I love linguistics!
So let's also discuss if it would be better to have CH as a digraph or as two separate letters C + H in Gaelic Scrabble.
As I have understood, Gaelic Scrabble does not exist at all, not even as a real board game. So we have to create our own Gaelic Scrabble rules! Have a look in our Latin forum, where we discuss different problems, because we also have to make our own decisions for basic rules (--> Grundsatzentscheidungen for our future latin.dic). So you will understand better what I mean. But making our own Gaelic Scrabble rules is a very existing task, too!!!
We have to decide whether Gaelic Scrabble will be played in Hungarian or Spanish style, i.e. using tiles with letters including accents and tiles with digraphs, or in Italian or English style where neither diacritic signs nor other special characters like e.g. digraphs are taken into consideration.
I love being able to scrounge off other languages! Excellent, I didn't know Spanish scrabble did digraphs. In that case our strong preference is for having the digraphs. We'll dig out the scrabble board though and test it a bit with paper bits - I think there was also I size consideration, I have to check my notes - but many Gaelic words seem very long due to the h thing. Even common words like mhothaicheadh or shèimheachadh would almost cross the entire board and thus severly restrict the words you can put on the board.
So, on the technical side, once we have our dic file, we need to replace every digraph with a number (what happens of there are more than 0-9?) so shèimheachadh becomes 1èi2ea3a4 (just using random numbers for now)? That's an easy enough job, just a replace script :)
Fortunately we don't have to go beyond utf8, at most, there's the grave accent.
I will explain those details to you tonight, dear akerbeltzalba! Unfortunately I don't have time just now! So please be patient, and start Skype tonight!!! ;-)
Zitat shèimheachadh becomes 1èi2ea3a4?
Yes, exactly! You've got it!
But keep in mind: All the combinations SH or CH or MH or DH have necessarily to be real digraphs! If not, you will get errors.
Vgl. deutsch: das Häschen, von der Hase, = das Häs-chen, wo das SCH eben kein "Trigraph" wäre, wenn wir im deutschen Scrabble Di- und Trigraphen verwenden würden!
What a surprise to have now two enthusiastic people among us who want to "develop a new language" for our beloved Scrabble3D! Phantastic!!! Thanks a lot for having joined us!!!
Cheers, Bussinchen
PS: Unfortunately I do not know even one single word in Gaelic, not even "Hallo" or "Yes"! I have never been in Scotland...
Yes, Gaelic is one of those languages with no single word for yes or no, you have to repeat the verb. For example if you asked "gingst du" you'd have to answer either "nicht ging" or "ging". Fun ;)
Thanks to the team and Kevin of course, without whose scriptmagic I'd be dead in the water ;)
The game is supposed to have 2 jokers - I didn't specify their addition, I assumed they would get added by default. So it's 100 altogether like all other sets, yes?
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We feel happy to discuss the Scottish-Gaelic letter set with you! 
OpenSource! 
