Brain on Fire » Blog Tim McCormack, distilled

I've been on an International Phonetic Alphabet kick lately (thanks to the linguistics class I'm taking) and have been contemplating the possibility of IPA Scrabble. As far as I know, it's never been done officially (by Hasbro or whatever.) Want to help make it happen?

Update 2008-10-25: Cascadilla Press may have something like this. Still looking into whether it fits the frequency and value model of Scrabble.

Update 2008-11-2: Cascadilla Press does indeed have a magnetic IPA Scrabble set. The rules are a little different (mainly to accommodate the difference between Latin-character English and IPA English) and the tiles are not designed for a regular Scrabble board, but the principle is there. They determined the tile values through gameplay, though it is skewed to work best for linguistics students, e.g. the less familiar symbols are worth more, and schwa is worth more to encourage multisyllabic words.

Update 2010-10-28: It has been two years, and I haven't done a lick of work towards making this happen. I hope somebody else takes this idea and runs with it!

I nominate "vermiblogging" as the coolest word yet of 2007. (Sshh! I know it's only 12 days in. It still counts.)

Used to be:

"Naked baby pictures"

Should be:

"Legal child pornography"

Okay, so I'm kidding about this one. But where doth the distinction lie?

Used to be:

"homophobe"

Should be:

"heterosexual supremacist"