@AlanMunn The rules say words must be in a standard dictionary. So camdeall isn't acceptable. You can't put cam in front of deall but you could make camddeall. You may find rule 10 interesting. I quote (from the English side of the rule sheet):
10. Players are not allowed to use the NG tile in cases where N and G represent two individual letters, not a double letter e.g. dyngarol. Similarly the use of the RH tile, e.g. arholiad, DD, e.g. ad-drefnu, and LL, e.g. ail-leoli. But as there is no separate tile for ph the P + H combination will be acceptable, e.g. triphlyg.
@AlanMunn This means that if I create lleoli, you cannot turn it into ail-leoli because you can't use the LL for an L followed by an L.
@AlanMunn In addition, you can use a single blank tile to represent PH even though there are no pre-printed PH tiles. So PH could be represented by a single tile or by two. But I take it that this is some kind of compromise given the frequencies of different letters in the language. So, presumably, even one PH tile in the bag would work poorly and they figure it is better to allow the P+H combination.
@AlanMunn I don't play Scrabble often enough to know anything about strategy. I just opened my game to read the rules. (I've played Scrabble in Welsh but I've not ever actually used my copy, apparently.) I played in German once, which was much worse. In both cases, we played using modified rules which allowed learners to use the dictionary to check a word before committing it (though not just to browse for words, obviously), if players included tutors.
@AlanMunn That is, I never read the rules before because we more-or-less made them up as we went along.
@AlanMunn And you can't add camd to deall to make camddeall either, of course.
@AlanMunn Is there a Chinese version of Scrabble?
@barbarabeeton @AlanMunn says that you are right about the 4 letters. However, I insist that there are only 2 lythren and 'around here' we would say there are only 2 letters. In Scrabble, you'd need 2 tiles and could not use 4. So you might have 4 letters but 2 consonants. However, this does not actually reflect the usage of letter 'around here', so I'm not sure how useful it is. ;)
@cfr @barbarabeeton Actually @cfr is being too kind. She's convinced me that there is real dialect variation such that for Welsh English speakers the meaning of 'letter' includes a bunch of digraphs. :)
@cfr No, there's no Chinese version of Scrabble. Since each character is a more or less a word already it's not really possible.
@cfr, @AlanMunn -- i've finally gotten to read the discussion, and i'm absolutely fascinated! (i suspect i'll never really have an opportunity to learn welsh, much less master it.) the matter of sorting reminds me of a totally non-linguistic sorting situation. the combined membership list of the ams and a few other math societies used to be produced from edge-punched cards on friden justowriters. so the cards were filed in large trays. (cont'd)
(cont'd) at the appropriate time, the job was divided in two, split between "l" and "m". as it happens, "mc" and "mac" were sorted before "ma". the person charged with producing the second half started with the "ma" tray, and the person producing the first half, stopped at the end of the "l"s. nobody noticed until someone with a "mc" name wrote in to report it. but he was very cool about it, saying that it was a novel way to handle the problem of where to sort that group of names.
@AlanMunn That was part of my worry. The other was the sheer weight of the tiles and the size of the board required to list their dosbarthiad (distribution?) ;).
@AlanMunn -- glad you enjoyed it. there are still problems with "mac" with tex, in particular in all-cap author lines and running heads. how can you tell the difference between "Macarthur" and "MacArthur" when they're all caps? ("Mc" is sometimes a problem too; some authors insist on small caps for the "c".)
@barbarabeeton @cfr I've always been fascinated with Welsh ever since learning as a child that the spelling of my name in Welsh is Alun, which I always thought was cool. (And I once had a mad crush on a girl named Bronwyn.) I tried to work a bit on the mutation problem as an undergraduate but it was hard to find speakers to talk to in Montreal.
@barbarabeeton @AlanMunn is right - that's a very good story. However, I originally mistook the l for an I and wondered whether the Jacksons, Kluwers and Lloyds didn't mind being excluded by design ;).
@AlanMunn Bronwyn? Not Bronwen? Odd. My father's name is Alun, as it happens. However, it is not pronounced in the same way as Alan, so it is not really correct to say that your name is spelt in that way in Welsh. Alun is the Welsh version of your name, though. (But then Sioned is the Welsh for Janet.)
@AlanMunn How do you know it was not a pseudo-random downvote?
@AlanMunn OK. welshgirlsnames.co.uk/#tothelist gives it as a less popular version of the same name. The reason it seems odd is that the ending -wyn is from gwyn, meaning white. But gwyn is the masculine form. gwen is the feminine. So, in a girl's name, I'd expect -wen. Especially since bron is feminine, too.
@AlanMunn In general -wyn and -yn are masculine and -en are feminine. (Subject to the usual caveats about exceptions which seem to go for any language.)
@AlanMunn Is that right? I honestly have no idea. Gwyn seems more common to me than Gwen. But, of course, I'm not talking about a pure English name-space. Even non-Welsh speakers in Wales are influenced by, and contributing to, a somewhat different animal, I think.
@AlanMunn It may have something to do with meaning. Purity and holiness are more popular themes in girl's names in English, I think. (Faith, Hope and Charity and are all girls' names.)
@AlanMunn Gwen also serves as a shortened form of girls' names, which might have an effect. I don't think the same is true of Gwyn, though I'm not sure.
@AlanMunn Yes. I think so. That one uses a masculine looking form twice. Gwendolyn is not unusual, although Gwendolen is presumably the original or, at least, more correct.
@AlanMunn Gwyn is listed as a girl's name, too. But that seems really bizarre. I've only known it used for males.
@Maïeul OK I suspect it's the new feature of \newinsert stealing registers from the float lists that doesn't work in a group, I can probably fix that (previously you would just have run out of inserts and stopped)
@Szabolcs there are several packages for grid typesetting that ought to be able to cope with that, I don't know paracolumns, but you should at least be able to make sure that the display math takes a whole number of baselines (typeset it into a vbox, measure its height then pad it put to a whole number of \baselineskip before adding it to the page
@egreg Duck action taken. :) I upvoted your answer thus canceling the silly downvote. Maybe the next step is to leave the topic be because people don't seem to be open to sharing knowledge, it is more a battle for ego.
@egreg: they prefer to fight for their positions instead of improving their personal expertise on math affairs.
@PauloCereda Also consider I'm unplugging all cables in my office, because tomorrow I'll be teletransported to the upper floor. Not the nicest thing to have in the schedule, although I've been promised that I'll find everything in the same place.
@StefanKottwitz I'll be out for a few days with no internet connection. I'll be unable to delete spam posts. Today, i already deleted 12. Some of the spammers had been spamming before.
@StefanKottwitz Please delete above if unnsuitable.
In my previous question, David Carlisle gave a great solution for coloring all text in a cell when the cell contains an \*.
I played a little bit with this code, but couldn't include it, if the sinuitx package was used:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{t...
@JosephWright I wasn't sure if suggesting doing it that way was a good idea in the first place but doing that and siunitx parsing at same time seems like probably a recipe for disaster, so i thought I'd leave it for you:-)
@AlanMunn He was absent for some time, but has restarted recently to plague the site with answers that are often interesting, once you get your way into the heavy and unnecessary usage of symbols and abbreviations. He seems not able to express proofs using words.
In my previous question, David Carlisle gave a great solution for coloring all text in a cell when the cell contains an \*.
I played a little bit with this code, but couldn't include it, if the sinuitx package was used:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{t...
