Life In 19x19

negapesuo wrote:Wouldn't this have an effect of making Go seem even more foreign to potential players?

You call it "foreign", I call it "exotic"

I think this old thread is partially relevant.

http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewto ... 10&t=11969

I find it better with japanese terms.

In fencing all terms are in French and no one gives a damn.

In numerous other sports too.

Peace

tapir wrote: If you want to reach children and pensioners (the two demographics I eye for the spread of Go) using a foreign language is not a good idea.

I really think that this is completely irrelevant as long as you keep the number of words low. It is not my experience that people are loanword-averse when it comes to hobbies. People in my country like ice-cream flavours with Italian names and France has strict laws about English words in ads because advertisers *will* use them because English is cool.

And whether you call it thickness or strangeness, people will eventually develop an intuition for it *if* it is used consistently. If it is not used consistently, then that is your problem, not the word.

gowan wrote:I think a lot of trouble happens when Japanese (or Korean or Chinese) terms are replaced by English words which do not capture important meanings of the original terms. For example, the Japanese terms nobi and hiraki are both replaced by the English "extension", even though the two Japanese terms are very different.

Yeah, but their contexts are different, too. I doubt if that ambiguity causes much trouble. Languages are full of such words.

tapir wrote:If you want to reach children and pensioners (the two demographics I eye for the spread of Go) using a foreign language is not a good idea.

Oh, I think that children take it in their stride. They are, after all, superb language learners.

Bill Spight wrote:

tapir wrote:If you want to reach children and pensioners (the two demographics I eye for the spread of Go) using a foreign language is not a good idea.

Oh, I think that children take it in their stride. They are, after all, superb language learners.

True. And it is easier for everyone to say "atari" then "Your stone or group has only one liberty left"

Stefany93 wrote:

Bill Spight wrote:

tapir wrote:If you want to reach children and pensioners (the two demographics I eye for the spread of Go) using a foreign language is not a good idea.

Oh, I think that children take it in their stride. They are, after all, superb language learners.

True. And it is easier for everyone to say "atari" then "Your stone or group has only one liberty left"

Or, as we used to say in the college grill, Bondulo!

Not that many terms are necessary to teach the basic rules of the game.

I use the phrase "breathing spaces" in place of "liberties", never mention the term "atari", and talk about avoiding repeated board positions rather than discussing "ko".

So to get someone playing games, I don't really need any foreign words. Once they are hooked, they can find out more advanced terms, as their curiosity drives them.

This approach has seemed to work well in the teaching I've done at booths or cultural events.

Football/Soccer is the sport of the masses over here and it has the English terms corner, penalty, hands (ball), ref(eree), keeper ... to mention only a few words which have become standard Dutch in this context.

As many have stated before, the terms you need for introduction are and should be limited in number. The issue with Japanese terms usually arises when studying the game and developing your intuition. For high dans it doesn't matter anymore, as their comprehension has already developed beyond the level of articulation.

As Bill mentioned, the fact that we talk about "shape" and "thickness" has hardly improved the confusion about these concepts but on the other hand heuristics like "try to achieve the same effect with less stones" and "play away from strong stones" are useful even if your assessment of stones being "effective" or "strong" is not well developed yet.

In other cases, the Japanese term is simply shorter and more elegant than its English counterpart: tenuki vs playing elsewhere, miai vs (creating) equivalent options, sente vs (having/keeping) the initiative, atari vs "taking away the one but last liberty" and no translation will ever beat ko. These are more charming and engaging than deterring, again as many have pointed out before me.

Cheers

I learned the Japanese terms when I first started playing go but now that I am in China I have been learning the Chinese terminology. Off the top of my head there are no homophones in the list. The words might even be easier for people to pronounce than the Japanese. Yet I think the Western outlook on Japan is more favorable than China so we should just keep to the Japanese terms. Though China will probably be the top dog in the go scene for a good long while until the international scene matures, if ever.

Translations are sometimes amusing. For example, monkey jump for saru suberi. Saru does mean monkey, but jump for suberi is a little odd. Literally suberi is "slide", not exactly a jump. But tobi is also a jump, but saru no tobi isn't used .

Leading to the reverse monkey jump or jumpy monk:

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gowan wrote:Translations are sometimes amusing. For example, monkey jump for saru suberi. Saru does mean monkey, but jump for suberi is a little odd. Literally suberi is "slide", not exactly a jump. But tobi is also a jump, but saru no tobi isn't used .

Isn't there a manga character named Sarutobi?

Isn't there a manga character named Sarutobi?

I think this is part of the Naruto menagerie, but as a fictional ninja Sarutobi goes back to at least Meiji times and is thought to be based on a real ninja. Sarutobi is also an ordinary Japanese surname but the fictional ninja is famous for being able to jump from branch to branch like a monkey.

The go 'monkey jump' has rather a different basis. First, it is a suberi = slide (i.e. a knight's move large or small from the 3rd to 2nd or the 2nd to the first line) and so that needs to be kept in the name. Where the allusion to monkeys is supposed to have come from is the rather clever behaviour of Japanese monkeys crossing fast flowing streams by linking hands and stretching out their legs ('sliding' or 'gliding') from stone to stone. Since the monkey jump is often connected with linking up groups along the edge, this seems a particular apposite metaphor.

The Japanese term has a useful nuance lost in English. The move type called 'suberi' overlaps with the same sort of move called 'hashiri' (run). The difference between them is that hashiri implies something rather energetic and urgent. Suberi is slow and not specially urgent. The significance of that is that most western players treat a monkey jump as sente of the first degree whereas pros are often much more relaxed about it - as befits the mood music that the word suberi sends through the Japanese mind