schrody wrote:
Words don't so much enter a foreign language as are hijacked by it. There'll always be a connection between the two but for all intents and purposes as soon as a word becomes accepted by a foreign language, it starts a new life independent of its origins. Whether you're bothered by this or not brings to light whether you're a descriptivist or a prescriptivist.
Not to put words into John's mouth, but I believe that he is being unabashedy prescriptivist here. An authority, Yasunaga Hajime, refers to the capture at A, above, which is plainly good for White, as a
ponnuki. John sees value in Yasunaga's usage, which has not been adopted in the West.
Where I beg to differ with John in these cases is that he often leaves the impression that the problem lies in poor translation. That is partly the case here.
schrody wrote:
That said, I don't see "ponnuki" as merely a shape. For me, it's a shape that results from capturing a stone. If it didn't result from a captured stone, then it's not a (proper) ponnuki. So, at worst, it's a static result of a dynamic action. As for the number of stones that can be captured for it to still be called ponnuki, I admit that I immediately think of a single stone. The more stones are added the less it feels like a ponnuki to me.
John Fairbairn wrote:
I have spent fruitless years trying to convince people that ponnuki is not a shape. It is a capture (nuki) made with a sort of kerpow (pon) feeling. It conveys a feeling that clarity has come to a game, as if the clouds have suddenly parted.
Ponnuki is not a shape, it is a capture. Go terminology, like all language, evolves. Usage today is not what it was 100 years ago. I have not ever seen Yasunaga's usage in modern writing. Today's usage is reflected here:
https://www.ntkr.co.jp/igoyogo/yogo_901.html The site says that capturing a single stone with four stones is ponnuki, showing a capture in the center, while capturing a single stone with 8 stones is not. That usage is clearly the one in the proverb,
Ponnuki is worth 30 points, which antedates Yasunaga. Another site,
https://www.godictionary.net/term/ponnuki.html , talks of cleanly capturing one stone, but shows only the four stone shape. That page links to one about the tortoise shell, which it calls a shape, instead of a capture. To me, this suggests that there are a number of Japanese amateurs who think of ponnuki as a shape.
Unfortunately, other sites that I found last night, in contradistinction to those from some years ago about go terminology, link to the go terminology page of the Japanese wikipedia. Of the terms on that page, only one does not have its own wikipedia page, and that is ponnuki. Instead, ponnuki is defined on that page, and completely wrongly. It says that ponnuki is the capture of a single stone, and it also says that it is the resulting shape.