The word guessing game Wordle continues to inspire new variations on the theme. I’ve just come across Glottle, a game that involves trying to guess a mystery language.
For more on Wordle, please see Wordle – Language Miscellany
You start by guessing a language. The game then shows a tree displaying the target language, the language you guessed, the distance between the places where they are spoken, and their most common recent ancestor.
Test run
I gave Glottle a try today. I selected the Easy level, which gives you 15 guesses. My first guess was Greek. Glottle told me that:
- Greek and the target language have Classical Indo-Euoropean as their most recent common ancestor.
- the target language is spoken 2.1k km northwest of where Greek is spoken.
Because I misread the information about the distance, I then spent the next 6 goes pointlessly exploring Greek’s Baltic neighbours (Cappadocian Greek, Albanian, Arvanitika Albanian, Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian), and through an input error I also selected the completely unrelated Croatian Sign language.
At this point, I belatedly realised what the distance and direction information was telling me, so I shot up to Scandinavia, trying Norwegian, Icelandic and Danish, before dropping back slightly south to try German Northern Low Saxon, Low German, Ems-Weser Frisian and finally, on my 14th guess, the correct answer: Western Frisian.
This screen shot displays the tree Glottle showed me for my last few guesses, leading up to the correct answer. (My earlier guesses show up in the top half of the screen when I scroll up).
This 2nd screen shot shows:
- my last few guesses, showing for each guess information about the relationship between it and the target language, as well as the distance and direction from the homeland of the latest guess to the homeland of the target language.
- some basic information about the target language, which Glottle uses as a source of hints if you ask for a hint. Hints cost one guess.
Help
Other help is also available:
- reveal a branch uncovers the next level of the target languages ancestral line, but consumes half your remaining guesses.
- answers from narrows the draw to a single language family, region, or country.
Other features
On higher levels, Glottle selects the target language from a wider range of languages, drawn from the 8,618 languages listed on Glottolog. For that reason, more guesses are available on higher levels: 30 guesses on Medium, 50 on Hard and 75 on Expert.
You can either play one shared Daily puzzle or try a fresh language whenever you start.
Playing Glottle
Glottle is available at Glottle — the language family game