On the 500th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, Jimmy Kennedy and Nat Simon wrote “Istanbul (Not Constantinople),” which was released by The Four Lads in 1953. That gives away one of the answers, but today’s question regards old names of world cities. How many of the current city names do you recall? (Some other time, we’ll do US cities.): Ikosium, Stuart, Bytown, Lutetia, Batavia, Edo, Leningrad, Byzantium, Londinium.

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Yesterday’s question was: The word game of Scrabble was created in the 1930s and 1940s, with the distribution and point values of the letter tiles determined by frequency analysis. Thus, the highest-scoring letters were those which were exceedingly difficult to use. In later years, however, with the growth of Scrabble tournaments, and the expansions of acceptable words beyond “a standard English dictionary,” those difficult-to-use letters became much easier to use, but their values were not adjusted. Today’s question: for how many of the 26 English letters do you know the Scrabble point values?

The answers:
10 points: Q and Z
8 points: J and X
5 points: K
4 points: F, H, V, W, and Y
3 points: B, C, M, and P
2 points: D and G
1 point: A, E, I, L, N, O, R, S, T, and U

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Ian’s Tough Trivia is a daily feature of this blog (Monday’s category is History; Tuesday is Arts; Wednesday is Science; Thursday is Entertainment; and Friday is Grab Bag). Each day, I post a tough question, as well as the answer to the previous day’s question. Simply comment on this post with your answer. I’ll approve the comments after the next question is posted. Sure, you can probably find the answers by searching the web, but what’s the fun in that?

And if you’ve got a favorite trivia question—or even just a topic for which you’d like to see a question—let me know! Reader participation is warmly encouraged.