One of the interesting things about being involved with internationalization is that anytime something vaguely interesting comes up with a hint of internationalization comes up, everyone will forward it to you!

In this case I had nine different people forwarding it to me, each I assume thinking they were giving me a good idea for a blog -- reader Tamara was the first one! :-)

Ultimately Mark E. Shoulson forwarded it to the Unicode List -- and with my pre-existing account at http://www.politicalcartoons.com/ raring to get used, it was easy to pick up a copy for the rest of you to enjoy....

Mark is eagerly awaiting the full Unicode version of scrabble....

A computerized version might be easiest if we can get the fonts together, makes me wonder if there are any font foundries want the gig to build that font, the one that will appropriately scale all of the letters so they look okay next to each other -- something kind of fixred width. Anyone?

It also leads to an interesting variation from the usual requirement that people agree on the acceptable dictionary is the agreement that people agree on the version of Unicode? :-)

Ken Whistler identified that last tile at the end as 𝌼 (U+1d33c, aka TETRAGRAM FOR DIMINISHMENT) and with a score of 𝑖 (U+1d456, aka MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL I), it is clear that the score for its usage is indeed the square root of -1, an imaginary number.

So don't pity the one with the tiles; pity the poor soul who has to decide how to score this game!

His move is obvious to me personlly -- I immediately would put the Æ next to the G near the top of the board to spell GÆ or GAE, a virtually extinct (there is like one fluent speaker trying to teach others at this point) language of Peru also known as Andoa. That will be 21 points and your turn....

I did find a few other potential moves myself but I like GAE best given the linguistic aspects.

You can try yourself -- here is the cartoon. think you might recognize the other letters there? Anyone else have a move they want to suggest?  :-)

 

This post brought to you by ש (U+05e9, aka HEBREW LETTER SHIN)