From: jcowan@reutershealth.com
Date: Tue May 25 2004 - 11:22:37 CDT
Michael Everson scripsit:
> >"Trumps" in English. I suggest that 21 trumps be encoded, but not
> >named, because the correspondence of names to numbers is variable.
>
> This would be the Major Arcana?
Yes. AFAIK that term is relatively recent, ca. 1900; "trump" (i.e. "triumph")
goes back to the Tarot's origin around 1450.
> >The Fool, the 22nd or un-numbered trump, is the direct ancestor of
> >the Joker and should be unified with it.
>
> I would disagree about that.
You seem to be right: the Joker was invented for the game of euchre, probably
around 1850 in the U.S. However, there is no doubt that euchre came to the
U.S. from Germany (_Juker_ 'knave', referring to the two highest non-joker
trumps), and it's barely possible that the joker was borrowed from the Tarot
rather than being entirely de novo. It is definitely not a direct
survival, though.
> Fonts, however, are not, which indicates that Tarot is not ready for
> encoding.
http://www.paratype.com/mstore/default.asp?restyles=yes&search=Marseille+Tarot
makes two fonts available for US$12.
There is a sample version of one of them, with only a few glyphs, available
for download at http://www.winsite.com/bin/Info?500000033545 (best viewed
at 72 points; the characters are mapped to Latin a through k).
On dominoes: I agree that there is no plain-text distinction between domino
orientations, and that it is appropriate to code each domino only once.
It would even be possible to code each half-domino only once.
If this is not done, I also agree that a single convention such as
low-end-leftmost should be chosen so that CSS glyph rotation will produce
consistent results.
-- Dream projects long deferred John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com> usually bite the wax tadpole. http://www.ccil.org/~cowan --James Lileks http://www.reutershealth.com
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