[Tlhingan-hol] Fwd: RE: Klingon Scrabble

[Rohan Fenwick - QeS 'utlh]

ghItlhpu' Qov, jatlh:
> Now does anyone want to suggest which letter frequencies we diminish in
order to
> bring the qaghwI' frequency up close to the 'at frequency?

Especially considering that building upon words already on the board is a big part of Scrabble, and a couple of extra qaghwI'mey opens up opportunities for that considering how many affixes contain it.

I know that Noah has put together a frequency distribution, which is pretty good, but I was halfway through my own and so I'll post it as well. It's based on four main texts in substantially different genres: ghIlghameS, the existing portion of mIl'oD veDDIr SuvwI', nuq bop bom, and the Tao Te Ching. nuq bop bom is by far the largest (350431 characters, vs. 122250 for mIl'oD veDDIr SuvwI', 34901 for ghIlghameS, and 22589 for the Tao), so in order to take this into account I multiplied the other three texts' results up so that the populations from each text matched in size. I'm happy to send on the Excel file with the stats in it so that the numbers can be checked.

0 points: chIm (2)
1 point: 'at (10), qaghwI' (10), 'It (8), 'et (8), 'ot (6), 'ut (6), Hay (5)
2 points: jay (5), may (5), Day (4), vay (4)
3 points: lay (3), ghay (2), bay (2), chay (2), Say (2), qay (2), nay (2)
4 points: tay (2), pay (2)
5 points: yay (2), way (2)
6 points: Qay (1), ray (1)
8 points: tlhay (1)
10 points: ngay (1)

As in English, the total is 100 tiles, and a sum point total of 200 points.

I've reduced the point value on tlhay, because as Qov points out, it's somewhat overvalued at ten points: in the all-texts percentage, ngay is by far the rarest, having a frequency of 0.86% (compared to tlhay, which has 1.49%, only just behind ray). The current standard distribution has two raymey and for the potential for playing -rgh codas it'd be nice to keep two, but the frequency really doesn't justify it: it's ranked 24th of 26 in the all-texts percentage. The duplication of yay and way is because of the existence of -y/-y' and -w/-w' codas. Noah, in your distribution I would argue that of the two, it should be yay, not way, that has two tiles: way can't appear in the syllable coda for 40% of potential syllable shapes.

Unfortunately there's also the need for a relatively high proportion of vowels so that playing verb prefixes won't deplete the vowel-consonant ratio too much, so the total of vowels is 38 of the 98 letter tiles. (The current distribution has 42 vowels.)

QeS

 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://stodi.digitalkingdom.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol/attachments/20130112/07fcff19/attachment-0001.html>