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

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

i've just added another name.

Or Hebrew, or Arabic ...

i'd wanna do it in yiddish then.

n/t.

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.

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

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

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.