French palindromes and Morse code
I got an email from a student in France who asked about a French counterpart to my post on Morse code palindromes, and this post is a response to that email.
PalindromesA palindrome is a word that remains the same when the letters are reversed, like kayak. A Morse code palindrome is a word that remains the same when its Morse code representation is reversed.
The word kayak is not a Morse code palindrome because its Morse code representation
-.- .- -.-- .- -.-
when reversed becomes
-.- -. --.- -. -.-
which is the Morse code for knqnk.
The word wig is a palindrome in Morse code because
.-- .. --.
reads the same in reverse.
French distinctivesNow what about French? I saved the script I wrote to find Morse palindromes in English, and I ran it on the French dictionary located at
/usr/share/dict
on my Linux box.
I thought I'd have to modify the script because French uses characters in addition to the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet, such as c, a c' with a cedilla. There is a Morse code for c
-.-..
but its reverse is not a letter.
It's not clear exactly what is French Morse code" because there are a number of code values that could be used in French (or English) to represent letters with diacritical marks.
The code for e is itself a palindrome, so I didn't need to modify my script for it. As far as I know, there are no codes for accented letters which are valid letters when reversed, except for u whose code is the opposite of z. But there are no Morse palindromes in French if you add u.
ResultsSee this file for complete results. Some of these words remain the same when translated to Morse, reversed, and translated back, such as sans. Others, are pairs that of valid words but not the same word, such as ail and fin.
Related postsThe post French palindromes and Morse code first appeared on John D. Cook.