March 28, 2006
Dakota Scrabble, anyone?
Via
Patrick Hall's Blogamundo
comes news
of Scrabble being used to promote the learning of Dakota
Sioux. Patrick wonders if the makers of the game "rebuilt
distribution and points on the tiles to correspond to Dakota frequencies."
I don't know about that, but the original
article about the debut of Dakota Scrabble (shortened for the AP
wire) notes that the tiles have all the appropriate orthographic markings,
as each set is hand-crafted by tribal members. Organizers got backing
from Hasbro to make the Dakota version of Scrabble (along with the 207-page Official Dakota Scrabble Dictionary), and they also received
support from the Association on American Indian Affairs and
Sisseton-Wahpeton College. The AAIA and the college have supported
previous efforts to revitalize the language, such as the recording of
Dakota rap songs
last year.
[Update 3/29/06: Tammy DeCoteau of the AAIA posted a comment on Blogamundo saying that the distributions and point values of letters were based on the words in the Official Dakota Scrabble Dictionary. So that answers Heidi Harley's question about whether letter distributions were determined by corpus frequency or lexicon frequency.]
Posted by Benjamin Zimmer at March 28, 2006 01:04 AM