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Word Source: Cyrillic and Arabic Letters??

In this series on alphabets, this is where it gets interesting.  The Cyrillic alphabet is used by Russian, many Slavic languages, and dozens of languages across central Asia, BUT the Scrabble dictionary just ignores it entirely.  Somehow, none of these letters count as English words.  I am puzzled at who draws up these rules and boundaries.  Languages are amazing artifacts of human ingenuity and culture, and alphabets are the iconography of those ideals.

I will list a few of the letters here.  Some have the same names as English or Greek letters already mentioned.  You can get a good overview on Wikipedia.  But of the documents I found, I think the Unicode specification for these letters is the most modern and comprehensive.  It's a PDF file, but well worth checking out the letters on page one and all the names on the remaining pages.  If that's not enough, the Wikipedia article links to six more Unicode extensions bringing even more languages to our global digital character sets.

IO, DJE, GJE, IE, DZE, KA, SHCHA, IZHITSA ... others are described one piece at a time as if the letter itself has no native name.  But my favorite in the Unicode spec is the Iotified Big Yus.

Not surprisingly, I see none of the Arabic alphabet in the Scrabble dictionary either.

So it looks like there is a limit on foreign letters as English words.  I hope you found some good letter combos in this series.


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