'Opening' of Cuba makes a Jewish Scrabble-lover feel more at home

[bemildred]

I know, I know, this has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine ...

Reporting from Havana—
He carries a dictionary under his arm and wears a very large Star of David around his neck. His name is Fidel Babani, but you can call him Senor Scrabble.

Babani, in addition to being an active member of Cuba's tiny Jewish community, is president of the also small, but growing, Cuban Scrabble Assn.

Two very different passions, perhaps, but in his island nation, adherents have followed parallel paths: From both vantage points, Babani has seen slow, sometimes contradictory change.

He speaks ardently about how the competitive play of Scrabble is spreading in Cuba, where for years it was virtually impossible to obtain the U.S.-made game because of Washington's long-standing trade embargo against Cuba. And also ardently about his religious identity, something he never talked about when he worked as a military bodyguard to none other than Fidel Castro.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-cuba-scrabble-20110905,0,220840.story

[xchrom]

1. there are so many people in this world i would love to have lunch with.

i've just added another name.

[bemildred]

2. I was thinking playing Scrabble in Spanish might be a good way to learn.

Or Hebrew, or Arabic ...

[xchrom]

3. lol! i was thinking of avoiding that particular humiliating experience.

i'd wanna do it in yiddish then.

[Ken Burch]

4. Yiddish with English letters, or with Hebrew?

n/t.

[shaayecanaan]

6. Bit difficult either way

you can attempt to play Yiddish scrabble with Hebrew letters but because the occurrence of letters is vastly different, you won't get very far.

If you were attempting to play Yiddish scrabble with a Latin alphabet you'd choose German over English, but even then I dont know how far you'd go as Yiddish is a dialect of middle high German, and not modern German.

[Ken Burch]

7. btw, in Hebrew scrabble, what are the high-point letters?

And as far as that goes, how does it work to play it in Arabic(if anybody here knows?)

[Ken Burch]

8. Interesting.

I picked up a Yiddish-English dictionary in a used bookstore recently, and all the Yiddish words were written in Hebrew script.

[shaayecanaan]

5. Doesnt work that well in Hebrew

too many two-letter words. Not really that good in Arabic either. Most serious scrabblers scrabble in English even if they can't speak it. They just go through the word lists and memorise all the words, quite bizarre in a way.