One tip: don't use words with a sandhi [1] (like today's word). It makes guessing it many more times harder, since you are actually guessing two (or more) words in addition to the joining letters.
I agree with this suggestion! However, I wonder if it's only because we don't read and write Hindi on a daily basis (as compared to English).
Also, I'd just like to say that this take of Hindi Wordle is the best so far - fill in the व्यंजन (consonants) with the स्वर (vowels) supplied as hints.
Even then, today’s word is pretty impossible to guess. The Wordle formula is too restrictive for a language like Hindi.
Written word-games aren’t a thing in Hindi (like Hangman for eg) but we do have a lot of stuff rhyme based games. Probably other ways to tackle this better.
> Written word-games aren’t a thing in Hindi but we do have a lot of stuff rhyme based games
Interesting observation, and I can't help but wonder if this is loosely correlated to literacy. Since most of these games were developed to pass time by the masses, it only makes sense that they be verbal rather than written.
The interface is somewhat non-transparent. I was looking for an 'Enter' and a 'Backspace' key. there's only one. Some clues on how to play might be helpful
The Latin Alphabet treats vovels and consonants equally, whereas alphasyllabaries treat vovels differently. It's much easier to construct letter games if all the letters are more or less the same. Add to that the complexity that ligatures bring. Plus the number 9f letters should be small so that games like scrabble are more reasonable
Yes, and it's awful because it isn't standardized. Current generations frequently use only consonants to type out a word and I have no idea how to pronounce them. For example "hai" (pronounced "hey") roughly translates to "is". I literally see kids typing a singular "h" instead.
For most Indian languages you can use IAST & can use an IAST keyboard, as it transliterates sanskrit based letters precisely. Though I don’t know why people don’t just use the original scripts as they are much more beautiful and you can find (virtual) keyboards for them even for ios & android.
Welp, don't get me started on the "hai"->"h" contractions! The one that irks me the most is अच्छा (good, pronounced "uh-ch-aah" with a hard and emphasized "ch") is written as "axa" in chats (more popularly written as "achha").
I am old! "Axa" is seriously everything that is wrong with the way newer generations are using the language with English alphabets! I still cannot believe people do this.
I have personally set a standard or a set of rules for writing Hindi using English alphabets myself and I have seen my friends follow the same. We do not use such shortcuts/shortforms.
Hell, even "Acha" is not the correct way. It must be "Achha" (double Hs).
Depends a lot on the medium and the demographic. Twitter has a lot of native Hindi users, and there’s more on some platforms such as Sharechat which focus on Indic languages.
Twitter even does a good enough job of translating Hindi written in the Devnagri script. Doesn’t work if you use Latin script obviously.
Not really. news channels, print media, billboards, internet websites use devanagari script. But in Messenger apps, FB, Telegram, people use latin script.
I'm also a native Hindi speaker and I've never in my life used the word which is the correct answer. The game creator should have chosen more popular words.
Hindi alphabet, interestingly, is arranged in the order of the part of the mouth that makes the sound. For example, sounds generated at the back of the mouth (like "k", "g", etc.) are listed first, and then you move forward to sounds like "t", "d", and finally sounds involving the lips, like "p", "f", etc.
I found this arrangement fascinating. Unlike the jumble of letters that is the Latin alphabet.
Here's a good explanation from Richard Salomon (2003), "Writing Systems of the Indo-Aryan Languages". Note the startling suggestion that this arrangement might have been systematized even before the advent of writing!
> In this system, usually referred to as varṇamālā ‘garland of letters’, the characters are divided into vowels (svara) and consonants (vyañjana), and each major set is further divided into subgroups, again on phonetic principles. Thus the vowels are subdivided into simple vowels and diphthongs, each set up as short/long pairs (a-ā-i-ī-u-ū, etc.), while the consonants are classified into the groups vargīya (comprising stops, sparśa, including nasals, anunāsika), antaḥstha (semivowels), and ūṣman (spirants, including ha). Within each consonant subclass, the individual letters are arranged by place and manner of articulation. Thus the largest set, the twenty-five vargīyas, is divided into five sets (varga) of consonants with the same place of articulation, arranged from the back to the front of the mouth: kaṇṭhya ‘velar’, tālavya ‘palatal’, mūrdhanya ‘retroflex’ or ‘cerebral’, dantya ‘dental’ and oṣṭhya ‘labial’. Each varga contains five types of consonants: unvoiced unaspirated, unvoiced aspirated, voiced unaspirated, voiced aspirated and nasal. This system may have originally been developed in a tradition of linguistic analysis before the use of writing, and only subsequently been applied to the written form of language in Brāhmī script. The earliest written specimens of the are found in terracotta plaques of about the second century BC showing a schoolboy’s writing lessons (Salomon 1990:271).
This is not specific to Hindi though, almost all Indian languages (except for maybe Urdu), use this arrangement known as the Varnamala. This collation order has to do with these languages using scripts descended from the Brahmi script.
As a non-speaker this would be pretty fun as just a pattern matching game. The only problem is not knowing the words. If non valid next matches grayed out as I went, I would know what constituted a word, without knowing the language.
I was thinking about making something like this but was stuck in a mental block that the number of combinations possible would be huge due to concept of _matra_, but pre-populating them was a really nice idea. Kudos to the author!
The problem is that it is nigh impossible to guess a word that is both valid and incorrect, at least on today's puzzle. It consists of three letters. The first two have a o matra and the last has half ka and an e matra. I literally can't think of any word that satisfies these conditions, except the correct answer.
The game won't highlight anything if your guess is not a valid word. So it was impossible for me to get any hint at all. I kept trying random letters and made over a hundred guesses but not a single yellow or green.
I think the author should fix this. If a selected letter occurs in any part of the answer, it should be highlighted even if the guess is not a valid word. That's the only reasonable way to make this work with Hindi.
I would like someone to do an analysis of quantifying difficulty in terms of alphabet size, word size, and vocabulary size. Because I don't know what the actual difficulty here is vs the English or the Hindi version.
That would be first order analysis. Second order analysis would consider the structure of words in different languages, such as how often pairs of letters occur together etc.
I have guessed words like ‘naafiz’ (enforcement) that I suppose didn’t make the Urdle word list cut. I also suspect there is a slight bias towards Arabic and Persian words
52 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] thread1. Do not count words absent in word list, like original wordle.
2. Put a limit to guesses.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi
Also, I'd just like to say that this take of Hindi Wordle is the best so far - fill in the व्यंजन (consonants) with the स्वर (vowels) supplied as hints.
Written word-games aren’t a thing in Hindi (like Hangman for eg) but we do have a lot of stuff rhyme based games. Probably other ways to tackle this better.
Interesting observation, and I can't help but wonder if this is loosely correlated to literacy. Since most of these games were developed to pass time by the masses, it only makes sense that they be verbal rather than written.
https://araf47.itch.io/shobdogoal
Like in wordle, all your guesses need to be valid dictionary words.
Shows how much this language's usage in writing and reading has declined.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Alphabet_of_Sans...
I have personally set a standard or a set of rules for writing Hindi using English alphabets myself and I have seen my friends follow the same. We do not use such shortcuts/shortforms.
Hell, even "Acha" is not the correct way. It must be "Achha" (double Hs).
Twitter even does a good enough job of translating Hindi written in the Devnagri script. Doesn’t work if you use Latin script obviously.
Shaabash!
I found this arrangement fascinating. Unlike the jumble of letters that is the Latin alphabet.
Note the "g" here is like that in "gum" and not "gin"
Here's a good explanation from Richard Salomon (2003), "Writing Systems of the Indo-Aryan Languages". Note the startling suggestion that this arrangement might have been systematized even before the advent of writing!
> In this system, usually referred to as varṇamālā ‘garland of letters’, the characters are divided into vowels (svara) and consonants (vyañjana), and each major set is further divided into subgroups, again on phonetic principles. Thus the vowels are subdivided into simple vowels and diphthongs, each set up as short/long pairs (a-ā-i-ī-u-ū, etc.), while the consonants are classified into the groups vargīya (comprising stops, sparśa, including nasals, anunāsika), antaḥstha (semivowels), and ūṣman (spirants, including ha). Within each consonant subclass, the individual letters are arranged by place and manner of articulation. Thus the largest set, the twenty-five vargīyas, is divided into five sets (varga) of consonants with the same place of articulation, arranged from the back to the front of the mouth: kaṇṭhya ‘velar’, tālavya ‘palatal’, mūrdhanya ‘retroflex’ or ‘cerebral’, dantya ‘dental’ and oṣṭhya ‘labial’. Each varga contains five types of consonants: unvoiced unaspirated, unvoiced aspirated, voiced unaspirated, voiced aspirated and nasal. This system may have originally been developed in a tradition of linguistic analysis before the use of writing, and only subsequently been applied to the written form of language in Brāhmī script. The earliest written specimens of the are found in terracotta plaques of about the second century BC showing a schoolboy’s writing lessons (Salomon 1990:271).
The Korean script, invented much later, is also impressively phonetic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Consonants
The game won't highlight anything if your guess is not a valid word. So it was impossible for me to get any hint at all. I kept trying random letters and made over a hundred guesses but not a single yellow or green.
I think the author should fix this. If a selected letter occurs in any part of the answer, it should be highlighted even if the guess is not a valid word. That's the only reasonable way to make this work with Hindi.
I would like someone to do an analysis of quantifying difficulty in terms of alphabet size, word size, and vocabulary size. Because I don't know what the actual difficulty here is vs the English or the Hindi version.
That would be first order analysis. Second order analysis would consider the structure of words in different languages, such as how often pairs of letters occur together etc.
In Kannada, wordalla can be parsed in 2 ways -
wordalla => "word alla" == "not the word"
wordalla => "wordle uh?" == "Isn't this Wordle ?"
1 guesses: 503 players
2 guesses: 61 players
3 guesses: 17 players
4 guesses: 6 players
5 guesses: 7 players
6+ guesses: 29 players
Most people got it in one!