> Tournament winners often don’t know any of the language the symbols are borrowed from
This might be true in less than 0.1% of tournaments so I think "often" is overstating it.
You've got Nigel winning in French Scrabble which is 1 example. You've also got Thai people playing English Scrabble, but nearly all of them have at least some working knowledge of English.
Beyond that though the humongous majority of tournament scrabble games are played in English and won by native English speakers.
> I grew up with a math version of scrabble where you wrote equations. I loved it.
I had that one as a kid too, though I never played it much (actual scrabble was way more fun to me). there's a current version called "A math" available in Thailand, from the same company that sells "Crossword game" (scrabble but without the trademarked name)
Aa lava? I always spelled it that way in undergrad. Now I’m curious. I guess one could argue without the accents it’s incorrect. But then we get into the pedantry of how most words are wrong as they’re mostly borrowed and mutate over time. No true Scotsman in the dictionary.
The only native English word with a phonemic glottal stop, uh-uh, includes it in the spelling, for obvious reasons. You could write ah-ah, or a-a, on that model, but this isn't done.
> But 'A'ā isn’t the right kind of correct either?
That preserves a bunch of information that can't exist in English regardless of how you write it.
"Aa" does the opposite, erasing information that is critical to the pronunciation of the word. There is no way to read "aa" as being more than one syllable long.
Tournament winners often don’t know any of the language the symbols are borrowed from.
But… when played less competitively, like with kids, it’s a wonderful word learning game.
Also to your joke about Risk: I grew up with a math version of scrabble where you wrote equations. I loved it.