Russian Scrabble Controversy

[Joseph Kautz]

Dear Colleagues and fellow Scrabble players,
        A minor brawl broke out at my place this weekend over the rules
of Russian Scrabble.  The rules state that any word found in a "standard
dictionary" are allowed.  Some players felt that only dictionary forms
i.e. nouns and adjectives in nominative case and infinitives should be
allowed.  I argued that these rules were simply translated directly from
the English version with no consideration for Russian's rich
inflectional morphology.  I argued that any grammatical word form
(excluding proper nouns and hyphenated words) should be allowed.  e.g.
past tense forms, verbal adverbs, oblique pronoun, adj, noun forms, etc.
        It was interesting that the native speakers of Russian were the
most zealous in NOT allowing for non-citation forms like verbal adverbs,
gen. plurals, etc.  All hell broke loose when I attempted to lay the
word "sn'av" - (having removed).
        Does anyone know the tournament rules?  All opinions will be
appreciated.  Joseph Kautz   - jkautz at u.washington.edu