Re: Notes on Tam Wing Kwong, "The Game of Sparrow as played in

"Tom Sloper" <tomster@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:

> The Big5 worked great for me. Thanks for all the, um, "kanji" -
excellent 
> stuff! (^_^)

Pity that your newsreader doesn't then tell us that your article is in
Big5 - I had to switch manually to Big5 viewing. Still, what can one
expect from Outlook?

> Yes, most interesting! And I noticed that on the cover it says
jiang4ma3, 
> while inside the book (which you mention later) it says ma3jiang4 
> (reversed). I guess that's attributable to the fact that Chinese can 
> sometimes be read right-to-left (especially when the characters can be 
> imagined to be at the head of a vertical column of characters).

Yes, of course - I didn't think that needed saying here!

>> "cardinals are not properly located inasmuch as North and South are
>> transposed", but does not offer any explanation.

> He's talking about the "table as map" problem (a frequently asked
question 
> from new players).

Yes - I meant that he doesn't offer any solution to the question.

>> The rules for Kongs ("§þ [gang4] Gong") are interesting. He says that
>> when a Kong is declared, a replacement tile is taken from the dead
>> wall, and columns moved from the live wall to the dead wall so that if
>> there are n kongs declared, the dead wall has (7+n) columns -- so the
>> dead wall *grows* as people make kongs! (He is unfortunately not
>> perfectly clear about the half columns.)
>
> He says that flowers aren't used, so he doesn't describe replacements
for 
> flower tiles?

Not in the main text; in the appendix on flowers, he says that flower
replacements are drawn from the dead wall like kong extras.

>>Then he says that in the
>> latest rules (presumably this is a 2nd edition addition) the rule is
>> simply that each time a kong is declared, one column is moved on to
>> the dead wall. Finally he remarks that some players still follow the
>> rule that the dead wall should always be 7 columns or 14 tiles.
>> I don't remember seeing such a growing dead wall rule elsewhere - does
>> it occur in other books?
>
> This goes a little way to backing up Millington on his "kong box" thing.

I don't think so. Rather the opposite. Millington says the dead wall
is 16 tiles, not replenished. The normal practice is 14 tiles,
replenished, which I take to be what Tam means by always being 7
columns or 14 tiles. The rules Tam describes make the dead wall not
just replenished, but even extended in size.

> This is a treasure trove of Chinese characters, suitable for copying and

> pasting. Thanks very much for this!  (Since we also have zhongwen.com,
we 

I rarely look things up there, I have to say. Go off to 
http://www.mandarintools.com/cedict.html
and grab a copy of cedict (both the gb and big5 versions are there).
That's good for pinyin lookup. For radical/stroke lookup, I really
think a paper Chinese dictionary is much easier to use than any of the
online sites, though I sometimes have to use unicode.org to look up
obscure characters (when I'm away from my hardcopy of Unicode!).

> can be simply used in Word documents - and it's always great to have 
> pronunciations.)

Yes. That's *really* the reason I put the pinyin in brackets - so I
can type the character again! My editor copes well with Chinese, but I
haven't made the effort to become proficient in the shape-based input
methods, so I have to use pinyin - so I have to look up a character in
a (paper) dictionary before I can type it in, unless it's one of the
few that I actually know.

>>µ^ [qin2] Kum  ´Ñ [qi2] Kei  ®Ñ [shu1] Sh"u µe [hua4] Waa
>>(lute/stringed instrument, chess, book, painting)
>
> I had a question recently from someone who had a set with these four
tiles. 
> I was able to identify qin, qi, and shu, but his set had a different 
> "painting" character - one that is apparently no longer in use. You can
see 
> the tile on my BB (http://www.sloperama.com/majexchange/bulletinbd.htm).

Oh, right. That character is a variant simplified form of hua4. The
now standard simplified form (which I can't put here, since it doesn't
exist in Big5) is a crossed box ¥Ð sitting in a |_| shape with a long
bar ¤@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 above. Some fonts extend the centre vertical up to touch the
top bar, but the variant form on that tile has extended the centre
vertical to touch the top and bottom bars (as it were, extending ¥Ð to
¥Ó), and accordingly shortened the top bar to make it be a top stroke
to a ¥Ó rather than a standalone ¤@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 stroke. The variant is either
sufficiently obscure or sufficiently undistinctive that it hasn't made
it into Unicode. This is the kind of thing that makes looking up
Chinese so hard for us poor foreigners!
I've seen many sets on Ebay with that character, though, so it must
have been fairly standard at the time.