Comment by fredoralive
10 months ago
I seem to recall whether 0xE1 in codepage 437 is supposed to be a Greek lowercase beta (β) or a German sharp s (ẞ) is intentionally a bit fuzzy, so its perhaps they intended it to be both a delta and a dingbat.
I'm not really sure if a house fits it that much, wouldn't a generic "house" symbol have a chimney (although obviously, it's hard to fit one in with such a low resolution).
It's most likely meant to be Delta, as used in mathematics and science (which is typically smaller than the Greek letter). Not only is the Delta in the Greek character similarly shaped, but Lambda is similarly distorted in the greek character set. Likewise, A, N, V, Y, K (arguably), and W (arguably) are distorted.
Although originally the character Δ began life as 𐤃 (named dalet, meaning door) so it should be a door, not a house (he says with a wink) and that β should be the house (from 𐤁, bet, meaning house).
But then, why is it one pixel above the baseline?
437 had quite a few “dual use” characters which were drawn to be mathematical symbols, but could be used to render (some) Greek text (poorly). It’s also notorious for having some accent marks, but not enough to fully represent most Western European languages; basically just German and Swedish.
Rather amusingly it had a Pesetas symbol for Spanish currency and numero signs an and o for abbreviations… but not a full enough set of accented characters to write everyday Spanish.