Mahjong
Mahjong (English pronunciation: ; also transliterated as mah jongg, mah-jongg, and mahjongg) is a tile-based game that was developed in the 19th century in China and has spread throughout the world since the early 20th century. It is played by four players (with some three-player variations found in parts of China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Southeast Asia). The game and its regional variants are widely played throughout East and Southeast Asia and have also become popular in Western countries. The game has also been adapted into a widespread online entertainment. Similar to the Western card game rummy, mahjong is a game of skill, strategy, and luck. To distinguish it from mahjong solitaire, it is sometimes referred to as mahjong rummy. The game is played with a set of 144 tiles based on Chinese characters and symbols, although many regional variations may omit some tiles or add unique ones. In most variations, each player begins by receiving 13 tiles. In turn, p ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mahjong Tiles
Mahjong tiles () are tiles of Chinese origin that are used to play mahjong as well as mahjong solitaire and other games. Although they are most commonly tiles, they may refer to playing cards with similar contents as well. Development The earliest surviving mahjong sets date to the 1870s when the game was largely confined to Zhejiang, Shanghai, and Jiangsu.Stanwick, Michael, 'Mahjong(g) Before Mahjong(g): Part 1'. In: The Playing-Card, Vol. 32, No. 4, 2004, pp. 153–162. They already exhibited various traits found in modern sets. The core of the set is the 108 suited tiles which were inherited from Chinese money-suited playing cards. The Wind honor tiles and the Four Seasons tiles were also found in the earliest sets. The honor tiles known as Arrows (Dragons in English) developed to their current form by 1890 concurrent with a new style of play called ''Zhōngfā'' (中發). Flower tiles, once known as Outer Flowers (), were not universally accepted until the 1920s. In co ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Mahjong Solitaire
Mahjong solitaire (also known as Shanghai solitaire, electronic or computerized mahjong, solitaire mahjong or simply mahjong) is a single-player matching game that uses a set of mahjong tiles rather than cards. It is more commonly played on a computer than as a tabletop game, although it can be played using physical tiles using a special wooden frame for its lengthy set-up process. Although named after the four-player tile game mahjong, the method of gameplay is unrelated. Play The 144 tiles are arranged in a four-layer pattern with their faces upwards. A tile is said to be open or exposed if it can be moved either left or right without disturbing other tiles. The goal is to match open pairs of identical tiles and remove them from the board, exposing the tiles under them for play. The game is won when all pairs of tiles have been removed from the board, and lost if the remaining tiles contain no exposed pairs. Mathematical analysis Playing Mahjong solitaire optimally in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Madiao
''Madiao'' (), also ''ma diao'', ''ma tiu'' or ''ma tiao'', is a late imperial Chinese trick-taking gambling card game, also known as the game of ''paper tiger''. The deck used was recorded by Lu Rong in the 15th century and the rules later by Pan Zhiheng and Feng Menglong during the early 17th century.Lo, Andrew (2004), "China's Passion for Pai: Playing Cards, Dominoes, and Mahjong". In: Mackenzie, C. and Finkel, I., (eds.), ''Asian Games: The Art of Contest''. New York: Asia Society, pp. 216-231. Korean poet Jang Hon (1759-1828) wrote that the game dates back to the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368). It continued to be popular during the Qing dynasty until around the mid-19th century. It is played with 40 cards, and four players. In Chinese, ''mǎ'' (马) means "horse" and ''diao'' (吊) means "hanged" or "lifted". The name of the game comes from the fact that three players team against the banker, like a horse raising one shoe (banker), with the other three remaining hooves on the gro ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Rummy
Rummy is a group of games related by the feature of matching playing cards, cards of the same rank or sequence and same suit. The basic goal in any form of rummy is to build ''Meld (cards), melds'' which can be either Set (cards), sets (three or four of a kind of the same rank) or Run (cards), runs (three or more sequential cards of the same suit) and either be first to Go out (cards), go out or to amass more points than the opposition. Origin There are two common theories about the origin of rummy, attributing its origins in either Mexico or China in the nineteenth century. The first is that it originated in Mexico around the 1890s in a game described as Conquian in R.F. Foster's book ''Foster's Complete Hoyle'', which was played with a 40 card Spanish deck and had melding mechanics. The second is that Rummy originated in Asia, and that Rummy was the result of a Mahjongg, Mahjong variant named Kun P'ai that was Westernized as Khanhoo by W.H. Wilkinson in 1891. Games schola ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Game Of Skill
A game of skill is a game where the outcome is determined mainly by mental or physical skill, rather than chance. Alternatively, a game of chance is one where its outcome is strongly influenced by some randomizing device, such as dice, spinning tops, playing cards, roulette wheels, or numbered balls drawn from a container. While a game of chance may have some skill element to it, chance generally plays a greater role in determining its outcome. A game of skill may also have elements of chance, but skill plays a greater role in determining its outcome. Some commonly played games of skill and chance include: poker, collectible card games, contract bridge, backgammon and mahjong. Most games of skill also involve a degree of chance, due to natural aspects of the environment, a randomizing device (such as dice, playing cards or a coin flip), or guessing due to incomplete information. For many games where skill is a component alongside chance, such as card games like poker ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Chinese Culture
Chinese culture () is one of the Cradle of civilization#Ancient China, world's earliest cultures, said to originate five thousand years ago. The culture prevails across a large geographical region in East Asia called the Sinosphere as a whole and is extremely diverse, with customs and traditions varying greatly between regions. The terms 'China' and the geographical landmass of 'China' have shifted across the centuries, before the name 'China' became commonplace. Chinese civilization is historically considered a dominant culture of East Asia. Chinese culture exerted profound influence on the philosophy, customs, politics, and traditions of Asia. Chinese characters, Chinese ceramics, ceramics, Chinese architecture, architecture, Chinese music, music, History of Chinese dance, dance, Chinese literature, literature, Chinese martial arts, martial arts, Chinese cuisine, cuisine, Chinese art, arts, Chinese philosophy, philosophy, etiquette, Religion in China, religion, Legalism (Chin ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Vietnam
Vietnam, officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), is a country at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of about and a population of over 100 million, making it the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, fifteenth-most populous country. One of two communist states in Southeast Asia, Vietnam shares land borders with China to the north, and Laos and Cambodia to the west. It shares Maritime boundary, maritime borders with Thailand through the Gulf of Thailand, and the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia through the South China Sea. Its capital is Hanoi and its largest city is Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam was inhabited by the Paleolithic age, with states established in the first millennium BC on the Red River Delta in modern-day northern Vietnam. Before the Han dynasty's invasion, Vietnam was marked by a vibrant mix of religion, culture, and social norms. The Han dynasty annexed Northern and Central Vietnam, which were subs ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Sinitic Languages
The Sinitic languages (), often synonymous with the Chinese languages, are a language group, group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute a major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is a primary split between the Sinitic languages and the rest of the family (the Tibeto-Burman languages). This view is rejected by some researchers but has found phylogenetic support among others. The Macro-Bai languages, whose classification is difficult, may be an offshoot of Old Chinese and thus Sinitic; otherwise, Sinitic is defined only by the many varieties of Chinese unified by a shared historical background, and usage of the term "Sinitic" may reflect the linguistic view that Chinese language, Chinese constitutes a family of distinct languages, rather than variants of a single language. Population Over 91% of the Chinese population speaks a Sinitic language, of whom about three-quarters speak a Mandarin variety. Estimates of the number ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Calque
In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new word or phrase ( lexeme) in the target language. For instance, the English word ''skyscraper'' has been calqued in dozens of other languages, combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language, as for example in German, in Portuguese, in Dutch, in Spanish, in Italian, in Turkish, and ''matenrō'' in Japanese. Calques, like direct borrowings, often function as linguistic gap-fillers, emerging when a language lacks existing vocabulary to express new ideas, technologies, or objects. This phenomenon is widespread and is often attributed to the shared conceptual frameworks across human languages. Speakers of different languages tend to perceive the world through common categori ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Thai Language
Thai,In or Central Thai (historically Siamese;Although "Thai" and "Central Thai" have become more common, the older term, "Siamese", is still used by linguists, especially when it is being distinguished from other Tai languages (Diller 2008:6). "Proto-Thai" is, for example, the ancestor of all of Southwestern Tai, not just Siamese (Rischel 1998). ), is a Tai language of the Kra–Dai language family spoken by the Central Thai, Mon, Lao Wiang, Phuan people in Central Thailand and the vast majority of Thai Chinese enclaves throughout the country. It is the sole official language of Thailand. Thai is the most spoken of over 60 languages of Thailand by both number of native and overall speakers. Over half of its vocabulary is derived from or borrowed from Pali, Sanskrit, Mon and Old Khmer. It is a tonal and analytic language. Thai has a complex orthography and system of relational markers. Spoken Thai, depending on standard sociolinguistic factors such as age, gender ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Erhua
''Erhua'' (), also called "erization" or "rhotacization of syllable finals", is a phonological process that adds r-coloring or the ''er'' (; ) sound to syllables in spoken Mandarin Chinese. ''Erhuayin'' () is the pronunciation of "er" after rhotacization of syllable finals. It is common in most varieties of Mandarin as a diminutive suffix for nouns, though some dialects also use it for other grammatical purposes. The Standard Chinese spoken in government-produced educational and examination recordings features ''erhua'' to some extent, as in 'where', 'a little', and 'fun'. Colloquial speech in many northern dialects has more extensive ''erhua'' than the standardized language. Southwestern Mandarin dialects such as those of Chongqing and Chengdu also have ''erhua''. By contrast, many Southern Chinese who speak their own languages may have difficulty pronouncing the sound or may simply prefer not to pronounce it, and usually avoid words with ''erhua'' when speaking Standa ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |