At 09:39 -0800 2002-01-29, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>Michael,
>
> > >>At some stage I will be requesting a shamrock, as this is used in a
>> >>number of dictionaries as a symbol denoting horticulture.
>> >
>> >What about U+2663?
>>
>> Where on earth did that annotation come from? A club is not a shamrock.
>
>If you'll do the research, it's been there ever since Unicode 1.0,
>so courtesy of Joe Becker. And this is the first anyone has
>noticed.
A nice reason to get version 1.0 off my shelf and do "the" research.
Yes, I see that it has the annotation in 1.0; it has therefore had
the annotation for a long time.
That doesn't mean the two are unifiable.
A shamrock is "any of various plants with trifoliate leaves, esp.
Trifolium minus, T. repens, or Medicago lupulina, used as the
national emblem of Ireland." Shamrock leaves are *heart-shaped*.
A clover, on the other hand, has round leaves, usually three, four
when you're lucky. A clover is not used as an emblem for Ireland, not
is a clover pictured in Íslensk ordabók as a symbol for botany.
Further, the card suits do not derive from symbols of hearts, spades,
diamonds, or clubs. From
http://www.themysticeye.com/info/playingcard.htm :
"Designed in the Middle Ages, the tarot deck reflected medieval
society, where kings ruled a world that was divided into four broad
classes: the church, the military, merchants, and farmers. Thus, in
addition to the cards of the major arcana--the symbolic picture cards
for which the tarot deck is still famous--the deck included 56 cards
divided into four suits: cups (the church); swords (the military);
pentacles, or 5-pointed stars (merchants); and batons (farmers).
"These first decks were made by hand, and only the wealthy could
afford them. When the printing press was invented in the 15th
century, cards were reproduced by means of hand-colored woodcuts and,
later, engravings. Their popularity spread rapidly across the
continent. The old tarot cups soon became hearts, the swords became
spades, the pentacles became diamonds, and the batons, clubs. In
Germany, however, hearts, leaves, acorns, and bells illustrated the
four suits.
"The French had the greatest influence on the creation of the modern
deck. They eliminated the major arcana and combined the knight and
page, reducing the size of the deck to 52 cards and simplifying the
suit symbols to plain red hearts and diamonds, black spades and
trefoils (clover leaves)."
Clover leaves. Deriving from batons, also known as wands or staves.
I also think that the note "= valentine" for the heart suit is going
a bit too far. In the first place, the valentine glyph is most
typically pierced by an arrow, is it not?
An interesting page suggesting that the Tarot cards may ultimately
have derived from China cites anthropologist W. H. Wilkinson writing
in 1895 on the subject.
http://www.ahs.uwaterloo.ca/~museum/Archive/Wilkinson/Wilkinson.html
Whether or not that Wilkinson is right, I don't believe that the
shamrock can be identified with the club suit, and I would ask that
the note be removed. I'd just as soon the same thing hold for the
note to the heart suit.
-- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
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