Ganjifa | Hacker News Reader

Ganjifa

en.wikipedia.org

100 pointsthunderbong28 comments

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- Hanafuda, Japanese playing cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanafuda

- Four color deck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-color_deck

- Origin and development of the Latin suits, with links to Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc playing cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_card_suit#Origin_and_d...

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German-suited_playing_cards

Fun fact about Hanafuda - you can still buy Hanafuda cards from a specific Japanese manufacturer who has been printing them for over 100 years and the more fun part is that that manufacturer is Nintendo! They still print traditional decks along with ones using newer IP like Mario and Kirby themes.

I own one of the original style decks and it's beautiful. Koi-Koi, played with a Hanafuda deck, is a great poker-style game that makes you feel very smart for knowing how to play even though the rules are pretty simple.

FYI, koi-koi is not a poker style game. Koi-koi is like a melding or fishing game, while Poker is a hand-comparison game.

Playing cards in some parts of Europe have alternate suit symbols. Spain and Portugal use clubs, swords, coins and cups. My favorite aspect of this deck is that the clubs symbol is an actual club weapon instead of the usual clover.

Interesting! I've seen the equivalent of the Hanafuda on a recent trip to Korea.

This could be an entirely new anime. "Ganjifa: Ganja Masters"

The name is unrelated to "ganja" (cannabis) except for a shared word root of "ganj" (treasure). I don't know what the anime would be about but the title makes as much sense as "Harry Potter: Pot Master".

I mean, I'd watch that..

Yeah, from my knowledge of Hindi and a few other Indo-European languages I can't think of any other word with the ganj- root/sound either. Another example (probably still closer etymologically) would be Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's/Philosopher's Stoned.

I believe the first of these I encountered, years and years ago, was a photoshopped cover reading “Harry’s a Pothead and the Sorcerer’s Stoned”. Can’t pass up either near-reference to weed with so few words to work with.

It appears there are some full parody books under similar, but worse titles.

https://rekhtadictionary.com/meaning-of-ganj-e-shakar

Well, the article says the "ganj" root in "Ganjifa" is Persian. I didn't know the etymology of the word "ganja" before so I had to look it up:

"Ganja" seems to originate in Vedic Sanskrit but its exact etymology seems to be unclear. It might be related to Sumerian "ganzigunnu" or it might be related to "Ganga", the Sanskrit name for the Ganges river. It might also share an origin with the word "cannabis" via Indo-Germanic.

In other words: it's unsurprising you wouldn't find related words in Hindi given that neither of the two words originates in Hindi, although Hindi is generally believed to be a modern descendent of Sanskrit (via Hindustani). The more relevant language to look at would be Farsi (i.e. Persian). With regard to Hindi they're two unrelated loanwords, one of which is even a proper noun.

What's the etymology of the poster's account, "thunderbong"?

Yeah, it rules.

That’s how poetry works

If you haven't seen it, there's Chihayafuru [0] which is an anime with the japanese card game, karuta (which comes from the portuguese "carta" for "card").

[0] https://myanimelist.net/anime/10800/Chihayafuru

About as exciting as thinking bonsai and banzai are related.

Well they rhyme so … depending on context you could probably construct a fairly impactful verse or quip

Do homophones rhyme?

Yes

To be fair, thinking that would be completely fair for an English speaker being exposed to spoken Japanese, with how much more common homophones are in it compared to English.

The illustrations on Wikipedia show some marked cards, hopefully they wouldn't have been marked cards at the time when they were new.

Is there any place I could buy this game of cards?

This seems to be an option: https://www.memeraki.com/collections/ganjifa

This shop is brilliant, thank you!

I have a cardboard set that I apparently got from https://www.tabcreations.com/ganjifa/ and it looks like they're still taking orders although I can't vouch for it. The card quality is reasonable, if a bit thin, and the design a bit boring compared to others I've seen.

The real cards are handpainted on wood, and often you can find antique sets on ebay at a reasonable price, but not for play.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganja

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