Do speakers of other languages play with their words the way English speakers do?
For example:
Hangman and other very old pencil-and-paper games
crossword puzzles
Anagrams (game of letter tiles)
Scrabble (game of letter tiles)
Probe (game of letter tiles)
Ghost (party game)
acrostics
word searches
Spelling Bee (NYT puzzle)
and now Wordle
They must not even work in some languages. Consider languages with a lot of inflected endings (German), or incorporated vowels (Japanese syllabary), or vowels that can occur before, behind, above, or below the associated consonants (Thai), or (pardon my amateur description) unidirectional structures such as the vowel strings in French, and repeating patterns such as the endings in Spanish. How would they work in word games?
Is there some other kind of word game or puzzle that you can play in those languages but that couldn’t work in English?
Do speakers of some languages never even think of making games out of their writing systems?
Topics:
Using Fluther
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