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
