Talk:Swords (suit)

This article was nominated for deletion on 13 December 2023. The result of the discussion was Keep.

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Merger proposal[edit]

I propose a merger of this page with Suit of Swords. These articles both cover the same playing card suit. One is simply focusing more on the esoteric use of tarot cards that bear this suit. Tarot cards are actual playing cards, regardless of their subsequent use in cartomancy. — ★Parsa ☞ talk 19:47, 26 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Latin suits and their non-correspondence[edit]

@BlackcurrantTea: The Latin suits individually do not "correspond" with any of the Germanic or French suits. The Germanic suits as a whole replaced the Latin suits north of the Alps. They did not evolve from the Latin suits but are survivors of a large pool of experimental suit signs. For example, the Hauk deck: roses, acorns, birds, bells; Meister Ingold's description: roses, crowns, pennies, rings; Alsatian cards from 1480: shields, crowns, bells, acorns; the mid-15th century deck with the shield suit existed alongside the Latin suits as a fifth suit. --Countakeshi (talk) 22:42, 13 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Then there should be a reliable source saying as much. For now there's the source in the article which equates spades and swords, and I added this page as a reference: note the image here. In describing a modern deck, this page from the same site refers to 'the suits of Swords, Batons, Cups and Coins designed in such a way as to be recognisable by their British equivalents of Spades, Clubs, Hearts and Diamonds respectively'. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 23:57, 13 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@BlackcurrantTea: Read the first article again, it states "Germanic suit systems (including Swiss) evolved after a period of experimentation with different combinations of suits". There's nothing in the article that equates one suit with another. The diagram is of no authority. The second article is of no merit, it's a modern deck which reflects English language suit names, not their appearance because the English ignored the French names in favor of the older Spanish/Portuguese names for batons and swords. For the French and Germans who designed the signs, there is no correspondence. As David Parlett writes in his The Oxford Guide to Card Games pages 42-43: "in designing suitmarks they forsook the ceremonial abstractions of Mameluke and Italian models in favour of concrete objects drawn from everyday life...<lists of many experimental suit symbols>" and "On visual grounds, it is vaguely possible to derive the German suit of acorns from the Latin suit of swords, leaves from clubs, hearts from cups, and bells from coins; but the preceding chaos renders such equations less than meaningful." For other reliable sources, I would cite Michael Dummett's The Game of Tarot (1980). Its second and third chapters are the most heavily cited work in the International Playing-Card Society's journal, The Playing-Card. These two chapters are the cornerstone of all modern playing card research and have largely stood the test of time save for the research of Andrew Lo updating and correcting the history of Chinese playing cards found in the third chapter. Another good source is Sylvia Mann's All Cards on the Table (1990) which also mentions briefly about the period of experimentation. The first WOPC article cites her. If you know German, there's Altdeutsche Spielkarten 1500-1650 (1993) by Detleff Hoffmann, et al. The first chapter explains the large variety of suits in the 15-16th centuries.--Countakeshi (talk) 02:52, 14 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

If the text from the WOPC page is acceptable to you, it seems curious that you'd say "The diagram is of no authority". The New York Times says "The four modern symbols for these suits are derived from the earlier Spanish and Italian cups (hearts), swords (spades), coins (diamonds), and batons (clubs)." That's a very clear statement from a source Wikipedia generally considers reliable. BlackcurrantTea (talk) 07:29, 16 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps we're using the word "correspond" in different ways, but several card books have tables listing the 4 suits in French, German, Spanish and Italian packs as if there were some linkage between their suits. Otherwise there would be no point to the table. At the very least, this correspondence seems to be used by card players to enable them to play e.g. Spanish games with a pack of French cards. That does not, of course, imply one was historically derived from the other. Bermicourt (talk) 16:51, 17 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Newspaper articles are not as reliable as well researched books with inline citations or peer reviewed journals especially an article with outdated notions not backed by modern scholarship. There are several discredited claims in Ahnert's (or is it Almert?) article such as the Crusader/gypsy hypotheses or the medieval class representation claims or the claim that each country's court cards represented historical figures (this is only true in France). That's just one paragraph; the others have more errors.--Countakeshi (talk) 14:36, 23 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]