I did a crossword today compiled by a guy from Brazil. Yes, it was an English-language puzzle. But that leads into an interesting point. I read him saying somewhere else that he creates puzzles in Portuguese and Spanish as well as English.
Writing a crossword in Spanish would be a special challenge, If you have "banana" crossing "El Niño" at the second "n" in English no one will really call you on it. The situation is different in Spanish, where they're considered to separate letters.
2 comments:
That's an interesting point about two Spanish letters for 'n', one with a tilde and one without. We usually understand crossword puzzles to just be in English.
One of the books I read recently was Reginald Hill's 'Dialogues of the Dead' in which he used a made up word 'paranomania' (from paranomasia - a pun) for a game he'd invented that was an obsession of two of the characters.
It's described as: The proprietary name of a board game for two players using tiles imprinted with letters to form words. Points are scored partly by addition of the numeric values accorded to each letter, but also as a result of certain relationships of sound and meaning between the words. All languages transcribable in Latin script may be used under certain variable rules.
The other thing about Spanish is that there are three two-letter combinations considered letters in themselves: ch (pronounced the way we usually do); ll (pronounced as an "ly" in Castille, just as "y" in the Americas); and rr (double-trilled "r".) Now would a Spanish-language crossword have to fit each of these letter combinations into single boxes or would they be looser about it? I honestly don't know.
Paranomasia sounds like an interesting game. The number values attached to letters is of course also a feature of Scrabble but the additional aspects could make it quite tricky. I like Dalziel and Pascoe as characters and the idea of putting them on a case that relies on wordplay and codes is intriguing.
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