Help me on rules for i18n hangman game

[Christos TZOTZIOY Georgiou]

On Fri, 28 Feb 2003 09:02:51 -0600, rumours say that sismex01 at hebmex.com
might have written:

>I don't know, I'm not designing the game nor writing it's rules :-)

I'm talking about the 'hangman' game that people traditionally play on
pen and paper around the world.  An example to make you understand
(quick google search):

http://education.jlab.org/vocabhangman/

So, the rules of the game have been decided years before computers were
designed.  My question is about the game in languages I don't know, so
that I can add some mechanism to deal with special cases that don't
happen in greek, english or swedish (which are the languages currently
used in my implementation of the game).  I don't care about the
vocabulary, anyone will be able to edit the configuration file, add
their alphabet, optionally localise the UI strings, and then choose
their language from the menu in the game, and start playing with the
computer in order to teach it words (and the language, consequently).

The game (having learned enough words) is a fair player when is its turn
to guess (about 75% success in greek with ~5300 words and 70% in english
with ~11000 words --in germanic languages, letters can be combined in
many more ways than in mediterranean ones.)

>A simple rule might be that compound letters are treated as
>the letter pair which makes them; so, "ch", "rr", "ll" would
>respectively be "c", "h", "r", "r", "l" and "l", mainly because
>(at least in my experience) I've never seen a keyboard with
>a "ch" glyph, nor a "rr", nor a "ll".

We agree on that mechanism.  What I still need to know, though, is how
*you* (any "you") played the game with your friends at school, esp. if
your language is *not* english, swedish or greek (I got all the info I
need in these languages already).

Thanks for answering anyway :)
-- 
TZOTZIOY, I speak England very best,
bofh at sil-tec.gr
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