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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> usually bite the wax tadpole. http://www.ccil.org/~cowan --James Lileks http://www.reutershealth.com
