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

"Julian Bradfield" <jcb@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote...

> 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?

I use Outlook Express, which has been set to Japanese as a default. I was 
able to view your characters just fine, but when I looked at my own post,
I 
saw everything as katakana. I won't be resetting its default unless
sometime 
I need to post Big5.

>> 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.

Well, I am fairly certain that the answer is what was discussed here on
the 
ng some years back:

"In China the East wind blows in spring, South in summer, West in autumn
and 
North in Winter. So the natural order of winds is ESWN. Mahjong players
are 
named after the winds, in order of play, East South West North, in the 
natural order." "In China it was common that games were played 
counterclockwise. In the West [it was common that games were played] 
clockwise. ... By coincidence East and West made a different arbitrary 
choice."

The choice of counterclockwise gameplay (established long ago), coupled
with 
the wind order ESWN, is the cause for the apparent "reversal" of the wind 
directions. I don't suppose the Chinese game designers intended that the 
table be seen as from above, the way we view a compass or map (that may be

just the way we Westerners tend to view things).

> I rarely look things up [at zhongwen], 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).

Great, thanks.

>> 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!

I hear that! (^_^)

> 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.

Until I discovered the Windows XP Language Bar feature, I used to use 
KanjiKit on my Windows 98 computer for all my Japanese writing needs. I
love 
XP...

> 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

....Rice field...

> 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!

(Sigh.) Yes.

> I've seen many sets on Ebay with that character, though, so it must
> have been fairly standard at the time.

Must have.

Cheers,
Tom