Re: Shamrock

From: Otto Stolz (Otto.Stolz@uni-konstanz.de)
Date: Tue Jan 29 2002 - 14:41:45 EST


Michael Everson had written:
> At some stage I will be requesting a shamrock,

I had written:

> What about U+2663?

Michael Everson wrote:

> A club is not a shamrock.

Sure, but is this relevant for the character at hand?
"What is in a name? That which we call a rose,
by any other name would smell as sweet."

You call the card suit "clubs". In my language, I call it
"Pik" (from the French word for a pike) or "Treff" (from
the French word for a trefoil, a clover-leaf, or, indeed,
a shamrock). (This holds for the French-type cards; with
the German-type cards, the respective suit is simply
termed "Grün" (=green).)

Michael Everson had written:
> as this is used [...] as a symbol denoting horticulture.

If I would see a shamrock symbol in a dictionary, I certainly
would perceive it as the card suit. Forgive my ignorance:
I had to look up the word "shamrock" in my dictionary (which
says "(irischer) Klee" (=Irish clover). And I had to visit
the WWW page cited in the original poster to learn its
appearence.

Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> [that annotation has] been there ever since Unicode 1.0
> [...] And this is the first anyone has noticed.

And may I add that I did not consult the index. Rather I went
directly to the Miscellaneous Symbols block, as, on account of
the symbol's shape, I was sure to find it amongst the card suits.

So my questions are:

- Do "shamrock", "trefoil", and "clover" denote the same
   family of plants?

- Is it really true that a native Englsh speaker does not
   link the form the clubs (card suit) symbol with a trefoil?

- Is there a difference between the clubs (card suit) symbol
   and the (Irish) shamrock symbol, in terms of character
   classes -- or, otherwise, could these be treated as glyph
   variants?

Thank you,
and best wishes,
   Otto Stolz



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