Five card draw in China
The thick of a game of poker is no time to pull out of the vernacular and use foreign borrowings, so how do Beijingers deal with the Roman letters on a set of poker cards?
I don’t play the game myself, but since it came up in a conversation, here’s one native Mandarin speaker’s version:
J = gōur 钩 [lit. “hook”]
Q = quānr 圈 [“circle”]
K = kēi
A = jiānr 尖 (it’s an arrow/point)
So “two hooks, a circle and a point” beat “two hooks, a circle and a kēi.”
Chime in if you know variations. I like the irreverent, hanzismatterish attitude towards roman letters. Reminds me of how I would have described the eszett before I had the internet to look it up: oh, y’know, that curvy B thing: ß.
I have heard 丁 for J.
My wife says kǎi. (Jilin)
I grew up with thinking eszett looked like B too. I remember that light-bulby feeling when digging around in older printings and manuscripts in grad school, discovering that it was a ligature of ſ (the “long s”) and s. Now I don’t see it as a B anymore.
Long esses can be pretty funny, looking back. (Link courtesy of Victor Steinbok on ADS-L)
OT, but: Switzerland got rid of ß many decades ago. I’ve seen a Swiss person call ß “Krüppel-S”, “Krüppel” being a very non-PC term for somebody with a phsyical disability. I wonder whether the person even knew its proper name.
I’ve also seen my share of texts that substituted beta or B for ß.
In Japanese, the cards are called 11, 12, 13, and 1, which is almost as lame as the Chinese days of the week.
I often jokingly refer to the Chinese graphical element 阝 as the “beta radical”, which I am now using as an excuse to tie into this discussion of German ß (not that it’s the same as Greek lower-case β).
The common Chinese term for this radical — an “ear” (ěrduo-páng) — is no more accurate in terms of historical derivation than is “beta”.