🚀 go-pugleaf

Graham Toal asked:

>Dmitri - do either you or our new Soviet friends have a Russian word list
>I could have?  I'm internationalizing (I know, everyone hates the word) my
>Scrabble game.  I have physical Scrabble sets for several languages
>including
>Russian, so I know how the display should be done; but no foreign word
>lists.

I too have a physical Russian Scrabble somewhere in the closet. I don't play
computer games much, so I'm not quite sure what the wordlist would be for.
If it's supposed to act as a spellchecker sort of thing (i.e., if the word
is not in the list, then it can't used in Scrabble), then the following
isn't quite appropriate.

There's a computer-readable copy of Zalizniak's "Grammaticheskij Slovar'
Russkogo Yazyka" floating around. It contains about 100,000 Russian words in
"normal form" with indications how each is inflected. It can be obtained
from someone in Utah, or a much-corrected version can be obtained from U of
Helsinki. It's *not* in the public domain, i.e., you're expected to pay for
it.

Zalizniak's word list seems to be the basis of all the Russian spellcheckers
that I've seen so far (not that I've seen many:)... The problem with it is
that there are many perfectly good Russian words that aren't in it---more
technical terms, dimunitives, you name it. For comparison, Elsevier's new
russian-english dictionary has 250,000 Russian words. So I don't think it's
quite fit for verifying words for Scrabble, where people tend to invent all
sorts of weirdness... Moreover, should Scrabble accept inflected forms
(i.e., plurals, past tenses, et al).

I very much doubt that another Russian wordlist exists out there, else I
probably would have heard of it. :)

Dimitri Vulis
CUNY GC Math

P.S. Two people have indicated that my request for funny, incorrect
hyphenations was inappropriate for this newsgroup (one of them calling me
asshole, in fact). Sorry, I should have been more precise: I was interested
in inappropriate hyphenations actually generated by computer programs that
hyphenate text (a subject dear to my heart). I work with computerized text
processing a lot, and I *thought* this is a good topic for a.f.c. (e.g., the
TeXbook quotes a legend about an RCA 301 that would hyphenate "God"), but if
a lot of people feel otherwise, I apologize & withdraw the request. :) :) :)

D