Gematria (was Re: They Win!)

["Schuyler D. Erle" <schuyler@tridity.org>]

Rachel King wrote:
> 
> > > > There are no 'z' characters in the Hebrew version, but there are more
> > > > than two zayin's.  I forget the point value though.
> > >
> > > a zayin has a value of 7, independent of scrabble.
> >
> > I doubt that Hebrew Scrabble values take the numeric values of the hebrew
> > alphabet.  If that were the case, any word with two Taf's would have at
> > least 800 points, and there are way too many conjugated verbs that have
> > two taf's out there to make this fair.
> 
> 800?  A Taf should equal 32 alphabetically, right?  Are there "final"
> letters in Hebrew scrabble?

Doesn't work that way, as numbers can be represented compositionally. After yud, which is 10, you have kaf, which is 20, instead of 11. Eleven is typically represented as yud-aleph (i.e. 10 + 1). This composition is then used to represent all "non-round" numbers except 15 and 16, which would be yud-hey and yud-vav, but these are the latter and former halves of the Tetragrammaton and not to be written down idly. So traditionally 15 is written as tet-vav (9 + 6) and 16 as tet-zayin (9 + 7). And so on, up to tzadi, which is 90, and then quf, which is 100. So taf, being the last letter in the alefbet, is in fact traditionally valued 400. 

SDE
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