Shabdle: Wordle in Hindi

[1024core]

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.

[lgessler]

This is referred to as the varṇamālā: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari#Letters

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).

[aildours]

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.

[devnull3]

> back of the mouth (like "k", "g", etc.)

Note the "g" here is like that in "gum" and not "gin"

[hunter-2]

Wow, I have never realized this aspect about Hindi in all these years. Thank you

[tnsittpsif]

Speak Hindi all day, but cannot guess a single letter in a 100 tries!

Shows how much this language's usage in writing and reading has declined.

[Grumpy34]

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.

[aldebran]

I’m in the US and very rarely speak Hindi let alone read it and got it in the first try. I thought it’s a very common word, no?

[umeshunni]

Do most Hindi speakers now use the Latin script?

[cuteboy19]

devanagari is not meant for such puzzles

[HexDecOctBin]

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi

[mwasiav]

One of the Bengali versions let go of all the consonant clusters, phala, reph, chandrabindu. You can only build words with letters and karas.

https://araf47.itch.io/shobdogoal

[plibither8]

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.

[abdullahkhalids]

Here is the Urdu version https://urdle.chaoticity.com/

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.

[selimthegrim]

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

[perryizgr8]

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.

[rk06]

Nice idea. Few suggestions:

1. Do not count words absent in word list, like original wordle.

2. Put a limit to guesses.

[nsenifty]

Kannada version - https://wordalla.online/

[dxbydt]

Heh heh! Too clever by half.

In Kannada, wordalla can be parsed in 2 ways -

wordalla => "word alla" == "not the word"

wordalla => "wordle uh?" == "Isn't this Wordle ?"

[peterhil]

I just get black background on the letters in Firefox – I tried all the letters. Does this work in Firefox?

[notRobot]

If I understand correctly, if what you enter is not a valid word in the dictionary, then it shows all black.

Like in wordle, all your guesses need to be valid dictionary words.

[throwaway091256]

Here's the statistics if you get it right ( I got it in two):

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!

[HJain13]

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!

[lsrinivas]

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

[teluguwordle]

There is a telugu version here at https://teluguwordle.com/

[ketanmaheshwari]

Just wanted to note that this is not my creation. I found this randomly linked on Twitter. I tried some but could not find the original creator.

[hdesh]

Based on the source code I think this person is the creator - https://cs.stanford.edu/~kach/

[submagr]

Hey good idea!! Promote it on facebook where a lot of old folks are. Or even on whatsapp groups!

[jvalencia]

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.

[navait]

As someone learning hindi, I'm looking forward to trying this.

Shaabash!

[yashg]

Where do I find the answer?

[captn3m0]

Source Code has it. (Also spoilers for the next few days).