Life In 19x19

One older go player told me a story. He was at some (probably scientific) congress and they had an excursion. In the bus he was talking in Finnish with two other Finns. An American person said that they should use a more civilized language. They immediately switched to Latin.

I believe that a Go player in the UK (Charles Leedham-Green) is in the process of translating Principia Mathematica into English. (He's working on the Newton one rather than the Russell one.)

Charles is a first rate mathematician. He takes the view that earlier translations have been done by Latin experts rather than mathematicians, and so the existing translations miss a lot Newton's truly ingenious ideas.

Whereas a mathematician may miss some of the subtly of the Latin sounds like a nice retirement project though.

drmwc wrote:I believe that a Go player in the UK (Charles Leedham-Green) is in the process of translating Principia Mathematica into English. (He's working on the Newton one rather than the Russell one.)

Charles is a first rate mathematician. He takes the view that earlier translations have been done by Latin experts rather than mathematicians, and so the existing translations miss a lot Newton's truly ingenious ideas.

That's quite interesting. I think what you want is someone who also does a lot of work with the history and philosophy of math, because of the danger of anachronism. But then again, I doubt he'd take up that project if he wasn't interested in those things.

I believe the "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" are at least as important to physics. The mathematical importance lies mainly in the development of modern calculus. The priority of which he shares with Leibniz. The latter though had a better mathematical understanding and notation of limits and derivatifs. Newton, mathematically, is mainly interesting in how he applies the modern calculus to ( celestial ) mechanics and other physics.

John Fairbairn wrote:

I was poking around to see if the 16th c. jesuits reported back on Go. Sadly, it seems Ricci wrote his travelogues in Italian.

Seek and ye shall find. Try Trigantius.

Do you mean Nicolas Trigault? Wikipedia gives the latinized form of his name as either Trigautius or Trigaultius.

As far as I can tell, Trigantius is an annual go tournament, run by the Cambridge University Go Society

(Btw, I am unable to find "trigantius", or any similar looking word, in a Latin dictionary. Is there such a Latin word? If so, what is its meaning?)

tundra wrote:

John Fairbairn wrote:

I was poking around to see if the 16th c. jesuits reported back on Go. Sadly, it seems Ricci wrote his travelogues in Italian.

Seek and ye shall find. Try Trigantius.

Do you mean Nicolas Trigault? Wikipedia gives the latinized form of his name as either Trigautius or Trigaultius.

As far as I can tell, Trigantius is an annual go tournament, run by the Cambridge University Go Society

(Btw, I am unable to find "trigantius", or any similar looking word, in a Latin dictionary. Is there such a Latin word? If so, what is its meaning?)

Trigantius is the name of the Jesuit who translated Ricci's (Italian) reports on China into neo-classical Latin and had them published in 1625 (or so). You can see the passage on Go in my post up there ^^^^

The whole book seems to be rather scattershot. The paragraph immediately after "Most dope among these games..." is about the Qing penal code. At first I saw "prisoners" and "cutting off" and "killing" and thought that Ricci was giving a somewhat gnomic description of the stragegy of Go, but in fact he simply is changing the subject to the three main ways of punishing prisoners. The previous paragraph is either about robbery or xiangqi... latrunculum works for both, once I was satisfied there was nothing about Go I didn't want to be robbed of any more of my time.

The whole book seems to be rather scattershot. The paragraph immediately after "Most dope among these games..." is about the Qing penal code. At first I saw "prisoners" and "cutting off" and "killing" and thought that Ricci was giving a somewhat gnomic description of the stragegy of Go, but in fact he simply is changing the subject to the three main ways of punishing prisoners. The previous paragraph is either about robbery or xiangqi... latrunculum works for both, once I was satisfied there was nothing about Go I didn't want to be robbed of any more of my time.

Since Ricci died 34 years before the Qing came to power, he evidently had remarkable powers of foresight.

Seek harder and ye shall find. Try reading the portion about go as the game of 200 stones with a board of 300 cells. See Go World #27 or #91, or go back to Leibniz (from memory, he quotes the Latin of Trigault). There is, of course, also Hyde's De Ludis Orientalibus for gluttons for punishment.

The confusion about Trigantius/Trigautius is that the Cambridge Go Society started calling their tournament Trigantius, but I raised the possibility that there had been a misreading of Trigautius (pure speculation by me). Charles Matthews, being a don at Cambridge at the time, looked it up in the university library and concluded that there was indeed the possibility of a misreading but in the absence of certainty, and as the tournament had been running then for a few years, they would stick with the name Trigantius.

I'm not sure I follow. I quoted the section to which you refer above (In alueo trecentarum cellularum plures, ducentis calculis colludunt, e quibus alij candidi sunt, alij atri). That whole paragraph is clearly about go. The passage in which Ricci prophecies about the Qing (or maybe, just observes the Ming) penal code begins "in plectendis delictis".

Edit: here is the section on punishment (of criminals, not of noseki):

In plectendis delictis remissiores videri possunt, maxime in furto, nisi vis interuenerit; nequi enim vnquam morte plectitur. In secundo furto, cauterio simul, & atramento duos characteres brachio inurunt, quibus innuitur iam iterato furatum; cum tertio deprehenditur, in ipso vultu eodem cauterio inuritur, si denuo deprehendatur, pro ratione delicti, & quoties eum deprehendi contigit, acrius remissiusve vapulat, aud ad triremes damnatur, spatio temporis a legibus praestituto. Ideo latrunculis omnia plena sunt, maxime ex infima vulgi faece.

cyclops wrote:

Joaz Banbeck wrote:Dominus Anulorum in tres partes divisus est.

Ceterum censeo et moderatorem ipsum criticandum esse.

Mala grammatica TOSo non prohibentur.

Sometimes I go to a traditional roman catholic church in my city. The mass is all in Latin, except for some biblical readings, like the reading of a gospel, and the sermon (homily), which are in portuguese (I'm from Brazil, by the way). So I know some prayers in latin. Also, I'm a lawyer, so I also know some legal expressions in Latin, like "non procedat judex ex oficio" or "nullum crimen nulla poena sine lege". But to have a full conversation in latin, no. Although it's not difficult to understand written latin once Portuguese is your native language...

Menezes wrote:Sometimes I go to a traditional roman catholic church in my city. The mass is all in Latin, except for some biblical readings, like the reading of a gospel, and the sermon (homily), which are in portuguese (I'm from Brazil, by the way). So I know some prayers in latin. Also, I'm a lawyer, so I also know some legal expressions in Latin, like "non procedat judex ex oficio" or "nullum crimen nulla poena sine lege". But to have a full conversation in latin, no. Although it's not difficult to understand written latin once Portuguese is your native language...

I disagree with this. While some words are pretty easy, since ours come pretty directly from latin, others seem pretty different. Probably a lot of evolution and influences from culture and other languages. I don't really remember any examples right now, but I usually need to do do some research to understand latin.

I tried to google translate some of the sentences above, and got mostly gibberish. Other languages seem to be just mangled, but you can still get some meaning out of it. That doesn't seem to happen with Latin.

Like I said jokingly above, I'd need subtitles. :p

Phelan wrote:

Menezes wrote:Sometimes I go to a traditional roman catholic church in my city. The mass is all in Latin, except for some biblical readings, like the reading of a gospel, and the sermon (homily), which are in portuguese (I'm from Brazil, by the way). So I know some prayers in latin. Also, I'm a lawyer, so I also know some legal expressions in Latin, like "non procedat judex ex oficio" or "nullum crimen nulla poena sine lege". But to have a full conversation in latin, no. Although it's not difficult to understand written latin once Portuguese is your native language...

I disagree with this. While some words are pretty easy, since ours come pretty directly from latin, others seem pretty different. Probably a lot of evolution and influences from culture and other languages. I don't really remember any examples right now, but I usually need to do do some research to understand latin.

I tried to google translate some of the sentences above, and got mostly gibberish. Other languages seem to be just mangled, but you can still get some meaning out of it. That doesn't seem to happen with Latin.

Like I said jokingly above, I'd need subtitles. :p

Maybe it's because I have regular contact with latin... but still, you can't deny it's easier to understand the general idea of a latin sentence than it is to understand German. But obviously, I think Portuguese, besides being one of the latin-based languages, is further away from it than any of the others, such as French, Italian and Spanish. Specially its grammar. I have never seen such a complicated grammar structure in any other language if you compare it to Portuguese...

But Phelan, what I actually meant is that having Portuguese as your native-language you'll find latin easier to understand than someone from an English-language country. Not that you don't need to look up latin words on dictionaries... For example, Joaz sentence in latin: "Dominus Anulorum in tres partes divisus est." I didn't know the word Anulorum, but the rest was pretty obvious to me. So it was not easy to conclude that the sentence meant "The Lord of (something) is divided into three parts." At first I thought he was talking about the Holy Trinity, but, being a fan of the Lord of the Rings, I just had to look up the word Anulorum to confirm it meant "Rings", but I was already almost certain of it.

Menezes wrote:[..] you can't deny it's easier to understand the general idea of a latin sentence than it is to understand German.

Wie bitte? Niemals! <jk> b/c I’m German.

[..] what I actually meant is that having Portuguese as your native-language you'll find latin easier to understand than someone from an English-language country. [..]

I learnt Latin at school, for full 13 years (in German it’s called “Großes Latinum” – Grand Latinum [Quark would be happy ] ) and—the other way ’round—I find that I can understand romanic languages relatively easily when reading. But that’s probably a banality.