Exploring the idea of crosswords that mix Latin and Cyrillic letters.
The key observation is that the following uppercase letters look pretty much the same:
| Latin | A | B | C | E | H | K | M | O | P | T | X | Y |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cyrillic | А | В | С | Е | Н | К | М | О | Р | Т | Х | У |
Russian vehicle registration plates incidentally use only digits and these 12 (Cyrillic) letters, so as to not baffle foreigners.
These letters aren’t necessarily orally equivalent (representing the same sound), or even proper transliteration of one another. Neither are they digitally equivalent (encoded by the same number); that can be exploited to play malicious tricks on computer users. But for what concerns us here, those mismatches are no problem. On the contrary, they’ll enable the fun!
Let’s set the tone and warm up with two simplistic examples.
An already-filled grid first:
(The 🇺🇸 CIA mainly handles overseas, outside operations. The 🇷🇺 FSB/ФCБ, on the other hand, deals with inland matters.)
And now one grid for you to finish. The row [→] is in Latin. The column
[↓] is in Russian, restricted to letters from Table 1.
The white squares are textfields that you can edit.
⚠️ A sound should normally occur whenever a grid is filled.
N.B.: Acronyms Seriously Suck!
Without further ado, here comes a 4×4 crossword grid, where rows are English words,
and columns Russian ones.
There is no blank; all squares are to be filled.
Clues hyperlink to their corresponding words, so that you can check your answers
(or cheat!)
The author doesn’t speak Russian (yet), but he knows how to talk to computers. So he wrote a program generating all possible grids, out of which he manually picked the one above. He finally had fun coining clues for each word.
Some numbers and explanation:
A small double word square makes for a fun curiosity, but does not feel like a real crossword. Bring back blank spots and we can get something better! Below is a slightly bigger grid, as a demo. Rows again are in English, columns in Russian.
Being limited to homoglyphic letters, while a good lipogrammatic exercise, brings too much extra constraining in our case. We have to stick to short words. We overuse (Russian) inflections. That doesn’t feel right.
If we are willing to allow “orphans” (lowly connected squares), we can devise more interesting grids. Only the meeting spots will be restricted to letters from Table 1, the isolates could use their full alphabet.
In the following grid, rows hold words which exist in both French and English,
columns hold uninflected Russian words.
Most clues this time link to simpler hint(s), not to the answer itself. The clues of
horizontal words are in French, for the delight of experienced
cruciverbistes.
The previous grid has too many blanks and too much symmetry to look pretty to French eyes, but crossword æsthethics vary accross the globe.
One thing which is universally questionable though, are actually the isolates, orphan squares. They do occur in “serious” and monolingual grids too, but they ruin the principle of connecting words. And it’s not uncommon for players to forget about them and just move on if they are the only spots unfilled in a crossword.
Can we do something to avoid them? Yes! Until now, each alphabet was assigned to a dimension (horizontal or vertical). Why not instead switch languages back and forth, in consecutive rows and columns? This will perhaps be a bit disorientating, but that sounds like a small price to pay to have no orphans in return!
Exhibit A, the next grid, features rows & columns alternating between Russian and English. Also, the format is asymmetric for a change:
Exhibit B is the masterpiece of this document, a French/Russian crossword. It contains less than 16% of blanks. We are nevertheless back to a symmetrical design; that’s to not favour one of the two languages. And to accomodate players with only basic or rusty French knowledge, the clues are mostly simple here:
We are done with the meat of our investigation. Now comes a couple little extras for dessert.
The Cyrillic letter «З» looks like the Hindu-Arabic numeral “3”. Check this:
A tribute to the great
Georges Perec, who coined a clever
1×1 (French) grid,
and who also played on numeral & letter homoglyphs to
define
Io
as 2 sur 5
.
Atom symbols (Na, Hg, …) are verbicrucistes friends. Imagine how crazy it’d get if we allowed whole chemical formulæ! Rows are in English or Chemist, columns in plain Russian:
Word search is another famous word puzzle that literally contains crossed words. And it turns out to be quite appropriate when mixing alphabets. Below is a short one, as an example. Words can be found ↘︎, ↗︎, ←, or ↑.
Д T H К А Д И С C R A R А I Т Л Р Е H Л K I P С A
Speaking of princesses and dextrosinistral (←) search, could we somehow exploit the mirrored Latin/Cyrillic letters (i.e.: R / Я, N / И, and arguably E / З & E / Э), on top of the shared ones having reflection symmetry (A, Н, M, О, T, Х, Y)?
Sadly, no. Mirrored words are scarce: only 33 in English↔Russian, the longest having just 4 letters (e.g.: HATE / ЭТАН). With French it’s even worse.
What about extending our list of symbols deemed visually close enough? 0h cert4in1y шe coцld. Consider also the metamorphosis of some Cyrillic letters when lowercased and italicized/cursive: Г → г, Д → д, И → и, П → п, Т → т. Would that make for more interesting puzzles, though? Doubtful; maybe.
Note however that only modern (post-) Russian (not even including Malo- & Belo-russia) letters were used all along. There is much more to Cyrillic script!
The goal of this document was to prove the feasibility of polyglot, poly-alphabet, crosswords. As such, breadth was favored over depth: shedding light on the concept from different angles, not expanding on any single one.
Another reason for this approach was that crosswords are “just” a game — though a game featuring surprising connections. Hence they were rather a good opportunity to reference other subjects, some more serious: linguistics, computing, chemistry, &c.
This document finally had to try to please its intended audience. Part of it
is Russian, most of it Russian-friendly. And
one’s breadth is regarded as
negative in the West to the same extent as one’s narrowness is regarded as unacceptable
in Russia
said
Vladimir Arnold/Владимир Арнольд, a Russian
polymathematician.
Arnold also taught in France, where he
lamented the elimination of geometry from the curriculum by
les zélotes
de la mathématique superabstraite
. However trivial this may seem, crosswords have
eminently spatial = geometric aspects: they are multidimensional (2D
— or more, if we talk figuratively), and there is a feeling of pre-existing
simultaneity and connectivity of the grid as a whole (even if its content is yet
to be filled).
Crosswords also obviously are a linguistic game. And on the other hand, language
(be it oral or written) is fundamentally one-dimensional, even unidirectional.
Le reflet
de l’unidimensionalité et de l’irréversibilité du temps
as
remarked by
René Thom, a French polymathematician.
Speaking indeed is about encoding your thoughts into
discrete
entities (sounds/letters, assembled into words, themselves into sentences) that you’ll
emit sequentially. Now if we agree with
Michael Atiyah, a British knight and polymathematician, when he
argued that
algebra
[…] is concerned essentially with time […] is a sequence
of steps performed one after the other
, then language is algebraic!
Therefore crosswords bind together algebra & geometry, the sinister and the eastern hemispheres 💏
L’auteur tient à remercier :
The only problem is that cyrillic and latin alphabet are different in writing, and it can cause problems in the crossword.That’s what she said.
Impossible n’est pas français, problématique encore
moins !, he replies.