Grandmother tongue, or the tale of Gonya
Incredibly, Will Baude writes a post about his head to head Scrabble match with my grandmother (unless by some freak chance there's another elderly lady named Gonya on the Indianapolis Scrabble scene). The story has the ring of truth, although I will say her English is better than he suggests -- she's been in the country since the early 50s, and while the thick Filipino accent remains and her hearing is deteriorating (from age, not immigration), she's certainly communicative! Maybe Will's charm just isn't so evident in person...
At any rate, there's obviously a challenge to be made here, in defense of the family honor! Baude can name the time and place of his choosing, and we'll settle this once and for all (but I must warn him that confidentally and the like will be promptly challenged).
I do agree, btw, with Will's point about how native speaker status affects a Scrabbler's prospects. If a non-native can take advantage of grammatical rules to genereate new possibilities, isn't a native speaker positioned to do so more accurately? We can spend all day cherry picking examples of words that will seem strange to a native speaker, but that doesn't change the fact that the native has a leg up on both grammar and vocab.
Of course, it's not dispositive; my grandmother still kicks ass, most of the time!
Will this be on closed-circuit or pay-per-view?
Interesting! I'd love to be a fly on the wall...
Until she moved to New Jersey this May, we used to play Scrabble™ on a French-language board with our friend Ghisléne, a journalist from Haiti - not a native English speaker, but very fluent. She and her siblings used this board to play, but frequently used both French and English words in the same game.
She kicked our English-speaking asses about half the time!
My question is - although our game was conducted in English, do you know if the letter frequency distribution is different in foreign-language Scrabble games? Would this work to the disadvantage of English-language players accustomed to the letter frequencies on an American Scrabble set?
Two players enter, one player leaves...maybe we could get a whole Scrabble Thunderdome thing going.
Bring it on.
This is an opportunity for a great blow-by-blow blogging of a game. We need pictures of the board turn by turn and of the letter racks. Commentary could be taken at the time or after the game to describe the play by play.
What? It would be exciting for word geeks.
Exciting for word geeks? Sure would. As a matter of fact, a tournament player I know set up a database for exactly that - play-by-play game logging with the option for people to add open commentary on every move, every position. It hasn't seen a whole lot of use, but the interface is there, and it is worth a look.
In any case, I'm looking forward to your matchup and subject it to rigorous over-analysis. Computerized 3-ply simulations, anyone?
I agree about our grandmother's kick-ass scrabble playing, and I definitely think Will was exaggerating about her English speaking skills (or lack-there-of). In fact, I think because of her accent and her difficulty hearing, people underestimate her a lot on the scrabble scene. I remember when my aunt took her to play scrabble in Maryland with a scrabble squad she'd never met before, and the first question that the leader of the group asked my aunt was "fine, but, um, does your mother speak English?"
Yes, but she could easily beat you at the Tagalog version of Scrabble as well.
I've played her before and she's kicked my ass! Haven't seen her in over a year, hope she's doing well.
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