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English go literature uses the word attack frequently (overly, I think, in John's opinion).
I would never have the opinion "overly" about anything. In ordinary modern speech I regard it as American.
Plus, I don't think 'attack' (for semeru) is over-used. It's rather that I believe that the Japanese nuances are overlooked by too many people here. I blame Hollywood (the source of so many other ills).
When I was young tv was rare. My family didn't get it till I was 11 and of course it didn't really cater for kids. All I can remember watching was the Lone Ranger, the FA Cup Final and the comedian Charlie Drake. Films were once-a-week matinees for kids where the usual bill was Superman and a cowboy and indians film, all in B&W. In other words, no war films.
My conception of war was based either on what I saw around me (derelict bomb sites), my father's photos from fighting with the Desert Rats, and whatever was in comics. There the diet was mostly Commando raids, naval convoys and the French Resistance. No Americans, no pitched battles.
People significantly younger than me have been brought up on a different diet. The face of war as portrayed by films now seems to be dominated by American shock-and-awe, or mass atrocities that were not mentioned when I was young - Auschwitz and Hiroshima. In short, war on a different scale.
Even more recently, of course, there have been attempt to inculcate in young people views of war that reflect anti-war movements. I'm not sure they've had much success, and so shock-and-awe still dominates.
It is my belief that the way you are brought up to view war seeps out in the way you play the war games go (or chess). I'd happily provoke an argument by suggesting that cohorts of western players fail to get to grips properly with go precisely because of their inculcated mindset. Far, far, far too much emphasis on invasions, for example.
The way Japanese players play has likewise been moulded by their views of fighting. More so in their case because they've has several hundred years of tradition which has fixed what we might call a samurai core. It's not the only strand, of course. Readers of Kamakura might recall how I highlighted the use of modern military terms such as bombers and tanks even by pacifists such as Go Seigen. But even the modern Japanese are influenced by their own landscape - huge mountains, steep valleys, fast-flowing rivers. Their view of go tactics has been so influenced. With such a terrain, invasions were relatively rare - one reason the Mongol kamikaze invasion struck such horror in their hearts and left them not knowing what to do. The divine wind saved them, not their fabled katanas. What might call invasions within their own civil wars were closer to raids and skirmishes, and when they were planned they were view as uchikomi - driving in a wedge. The idea of a D-Day type invasion across a wide front, or mass cavalry charges were not part of the usual deliberations. Favoured instead were surrounding manoeuvres, for which go provided a ready model. They had castles, for the daimyo, but not fortified towns.
In China, the terrain was quite different. Vast plains, huge rivers, huge lakes, few but highly strategic mountain passes. Cities (and the general populace) found sanctuary in cities with enormous walls. Generals there had to learn to manoeuvre in quite different ways from Japan. Large-scale army treks, huge flotillas of ships, early-warning garrisons, city walls and even Great Walls, produced a military viewpoint that could stress different things from those of Japanese generals, but surrounding was still a major feature. Diplomacy and alliances also played a massive part. It may not be too fanciful to suggest that the emphasis on keeping connections (alliances) was reflected in go via the group tax.
Eventually, all these elements were translated into the pseudo-military terms that were used to talk about, but differently in both China and Japan. The Chinese were at it much longer, of course, and always had the very ancient classics such as the Art of War and Book of Changes to fall back. Actually it took a couple of millennia for all this to take place - in the 17th century - as regards strategic terms. Tactical terms such as hane had been known several hundred years earlier, but strategic terms were limited to those borrowed from the old classics (e.g. 正 and 奇 or 实 and 虚). The spur for the introduction of strategic terms seems to have been the introduction of commentaries. The first major commented book (100 games) was Yi Mo. The language there is rather pedestrian. Almost the only word of praise was 'good' 好. The players, although they included guoshous (meijins) such as Guo Bailing and Lin Fuqing were also not yet quite at the top level (and so had limited strategic range).
When we skip ahead to the second book of commentaries, the Bugu Bian, the level of the players was much higher - this was the book that introduced Huang Longshi to the world - and the strength of the commentator (Wu Ruizheng) was top-notch. We see new strategies and new terms. I have mentioned the lighthouse strategy elsewhere. Another change was the introduction of new terms of praise used consistently (i.e. we can regard them as technical terms). 'Good' 好 still appears, but is outnumbered by a much more meaningful 细 (having good technique/good suji: very much a tactical term) and is almost matched 是 (correct), 正 (orthodox/normal) and the occasional 妙 (excellent).
However, what might surprise the most is that the commonest words cover a range of words that could all come under the heading of attack. They are differentiated, even this early.
The 5th most common word in the entire corpus of Bugu Bian's 66 commentaries is 紧. It was not then an entirely new word in go, but the sheer dominance of it is new. In fact, where 细 was Wu's go-to word for 'good' in the tactical sense (96 instances), 紧 was his go-to word for 'good' when it came to strategy. It has 149 instances, or 2.4% of the entire corpus.
If we treat 'attack' as a very broad heading, we can put under it several very common terms, starting with 紧 and then, in order but still common 收 (walling off; 81 instances), 攻 (direct attack, often with techniques such as cuts; 49 instances), 侵 (encroachments; 35 instances.) There is also a range of occasional terms such as 逼 (checks) and 镇 (caps).
You would get a very different pattern if you looked at Japanese go corpora. 紧 would virtually disappear there. I think the reasons are two- or threefold. The main reason may be that the military terrains differed. The meaning of 紧 in the old Chinese texts is 'put pressure on.' The associations are words like 'forceful' and 'assertive'. We may add 'severe' but
not in the sense of having severe consequences. It's more to do with struct control. This control is expressed by manoeuvring - sometimes close up, sometimes at a short distance - and what you are trying to achieve with it is not 'attack and kill' but rather keeping the initiative, making profit by bullying or by 'free moves' (another new concept in these commentaries). This, in my view, reflects the terrain encountered by Chinese generals. They has space to manoeuvre - they were often happy to "win without fighting".
Because the terrain was different in Japan, these terms did not have the same resonances. They were therefore adapted or enhanced. 攻 became more common, because direct action such as skirmishes were more in their line, but a skirmish is not a full-scale attack, and so the idea of the lower level 'putting pressure on' was always latent. It was more in your face than Chinese 紧. If they wanted to express Chinese 紧 they would use せまる which is clearly related to せめる. Because large-scale surrounding manoeuvres were more difficult in Japan, they used words for their own versions, such as twisting attacks 絡み and running battles 競合い and yoritsuki 寄付き which might be called
strategic bullying. They also came up with their own kind of invasions: 打込み. These latter terms do not exist in Chinese. That's not to say the ideas are unknown. It's rather that they are so relatively uncommon that there was anciently no standard technical term.
A third reason for the differences must be the rules. Group tax is a pretty severe penalty and so tactics or strategies that led to one's own groups being separated were eschewed. Encroachments (侵) rather than invasions were favoured. In Wu Ruizheng's usage these encroachments included what we call reductions and even often what we call peeps, but they also covered encroachments via open skirts, and that became by far the main usage later on.
Much, much more could be said about all this, but I hope I have given enough to show that bot the ancient Chinese and the Japanese came up with terminology of their own that expressed their view of how military campaigns, and by extension go/weiqi campaigns were best carried out.
If we look at the west we have nothing comparable. We have no body of work that expresses our inculcated military ideas about shock-and-awe, atom bombs, nerve gas, asymmetric warfare, cyberwarfare and so on the go board. We haven't even found a space for Rambo. I think the nearest we've got might be "build a wall" or "have a peaceful riot", but that doesn't amount to more than a row of beans. It's no wonder we are so far behind.
Maybe what we can do, though, is ditch the military analogies (and by extension the terms) and start with a clean slate with AI as our inspiration.