Life In 19x19

Note that a board for playing chess is not called a 'chess board'. It's called a chessboard - a single special word just for that kind of board. If we were to have a single word for the board for playing go (and why not?), I'd much rather have 'goban' than 'goboard'.

I don't know... I wouldn't find it strange if someone said something like, "I had some wasabi the other day, and it was really spicy. I ate some rice to cool down my mouth."

Here, they could have used the term, "Japanese horseradish" instead of wasabi (and why didn't they use something like　飯 instead of "rice"), but now that wasabi's a word that we hear often, it doesn't sound so unusual if someone uses the term.

Bad example. Japanese horseradish means nothing to anyone and we don't have wasabi here. But we do have rice. Surely even you'd find it strange to hear someone say "I had gohan for lunch" instead of "I had rice for lunch".

tchan's plea for jargon falls on deaf ears with me. That's insiderism. Borrowing foreign words is fine, if it serves a good purpose. Goban has no good purpose.

John Fairbairn wrote:Goban has no good purpose.

No good purpose perhaps, but it seems to be good for getting your goat.

Goban is good in foreign languages. For example, it's significally faster to say than "plateau de Go" in French, and therefore, i'll use it, knowing that the go community knows what I'm speaking about

John Fairbairn wrote:
Bad example. Japanese horseradish means nothing to anyone and we don't have wasabi here. But we do have rice. Surely even you'd find it strange to hear someone say "I had gohan for lunch" instead of "I had rice for lunch".

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Why does Japanese horseradish mean nothing to anyone? Because it's something that's imported from Japan? Isn't the same true for go boards?

The more I think about this topic, the more it interests me.

One observation that I just had was that, even if a word has pretty much the same meaning in different languages, sometimes hearing it makes me have a different feeling.

An example that comes to mind is ramen (a Japanese word) vs. ramyun (a Korean word). Surely both words can be used to describe the same dish, but when I think of the word ramen, I am reminded of Japanese brand/style noodles, whereas when I think of ramyun, I think of Korean brands.

I suppose that the two might be differentiated in Japanese or Korean (eg. 韓国ラーメン ("Korean ramen/ramyun") - to specify Korean style ramen in Japanese, or maybe 일본 라면 ("Japanese ramen/ramyun") - in Korean), but when I think of simply the word "ramen", I typically think of "Japanese style ramen", whereas when I think of the word "ramyun", I think of Korean style ramen.

I wonder if the use of a word like "goban" makes one think a bit of Japanese culture while talking about the object...

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On the other hand, a word like "sushi" is so common in English, that I think both of Korean chobab and Japanese sushi when I use the term. Interesting...

Maybe that's what's different between a word like "wasabi" and a word like "goban". Wasabi is so common that it's become a part of the English language. Maybe it was easier to say "wasabi" than "Japanese horseradish", so it caught on?

Maybe it's easier to say "ramen" than to make up an English equivalent?

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I guess I'm just talking to myself right now, but maybe word preference has to do with the order in which we discover something.

If I know the word for rice already, and I hear someone saying, "gohan", I might wonder, "Why not just use the English word for 'rice'?".

I think that I learned the word "wasabi", on the other hand, before ever hearing the term, "Japanese horseradish", so "wasabi" seems more natural to me. If, on the other hand, I had heard of "Japanese horseradish" all my life, and someone just now introduced the word "wasabi" into the English venacular, I might find it a bit odd thinking, "Why not use the term, 'Japanese horseradish'?".

I guess in the case of go boards... If you know something about the game of go already, and you are introduced to the board on which the game is played... Then it seems natural to call this object a "go board". You know what "go" is - and this is the board on which the game is played.

But if you knew nothing about the game at all, and were introduced to this rectangular object with lines on it... Then if some Japanese speaker introduced the name of this weird object to you, calling this object a "goban"... Then, I suppose it'd be natural to associate this object with the word "goban".

So I guess if we think of "go" and its accessories as unique entities, not relating them to anything else we are familiar with, then "goban" seems natural to me.

But if, on the other hand, we think of "go" as a "board" game, just like chess, othello, Monopoly, and the like... Then, it seems natural to consider the board on which this game is played to be called a "go board".

If I had introduced my son to sashimi as "raw chunks of dead fish," I would have saved a lot of money.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Special-Deer-Skin-G ... 309wt_1139

This would be a go board I would prefer not to call a goban.

I tend to think of this as goban.

Kirby wrote:But if, on the other hand, we think of "go" as a "board" game, just like chess, othello, Monopoly, and the like... Then, it seems natural to consider the board on which this game is played to be called a "go board".

Not really - see my post above. A chessboard is not called a "chess board". And "goboard" is just a really ugly word I'd rather avoid.

palapiku wrote:

Kirby wrote:But if, on the other hand, we think of "go" as a "board" game, just like chess, othello, Monopoly, and the like... Then, it seems natural to consider the board on which this game is played to be called a "go board".

Not really - see my post above. A chessboard is not called a "chess board". And "goboard" is just a really ugly word I'd rather avoid.

I think that it's still okay to call a "chessboard" a "chess board", because it is a board game, and the "chessboard"/"chess board" is the board on which the game is played. For example, the wikipedia page for chessboard seems to use "chessboard" and "chess board" interchangeably. Some other board games don't have a special word for the board. For example, "Monopoly" has no "Monopolyboard", but it is the "Monopoly board".

So I'm not sure if my mind is changed on the part that you quoted.

But to your point, games sometimes adopt names for their components - some games call the pieces "pawns" (I'm talking about games that have only one type of piece, for example), or maybe "tokens". It might be perfectly fine to use the word "piece" to denote the name of what is being referred to here.

So I suppose "goban" could be used in the same way to denote a particular component of the game, like you suggest. Although, if you still consider go to be a board game, then I'd say that it'd probably still be acceptable for somebody to call the "goban" a "go board".

Maybe both are OK.

Kirby wrote:I think that it's still okay to call a "chessboard" a "chess board", because it is a board game, and the "chessboard"/"chess board" is the board on which the game is played.

Yes, it's still okay, because a chessboard is literally a chess board. Nevertheless, a special word for the chessboard exists. It even has its own wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chessboard
If chess deserves a unique word for its board, why not go?

palapiku wrote:

Kirby wrote:I think that it's still okay to call a "chessboard" a "chess board", because it is a board game, and the "chessboard"/"chess board" is the board on which the game is played.

Yes, it's still okay, because a chessboard is literally a chess board. Nevertheless, a special word for the chessboard exists. It even has its own wikipedia article, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chessboard
If chess deserves a unique word for its board, why not go?

Sure. I guess I agree with you there. I don't know if it's necessary or not, but I don't see a problem with it. Then again, I've never met anyone that's been turned off to go because of its jargon.

a special word for the chessboard exists.

This is a very weak argument because it probably simply reflects the American tendency to run words together. Brits and others tend to avoid that, though may use a hyphen. Americans say checkerboard but we say draughts board.

In any case a Google search on "chessboard" gave me 2,040,000 hits. On "chess board" I got 2,120,000.

For "go board" I got 786,000. It was hard to get a figure for goban as this seems to have multiple other usages, but the nearest I could get (by using additional words such as board or game) came in generally at less than half that.

I kind of want to make a new name for go boards, now. Maybe I'll call a go board/goban the "plateau of combat".

"I sat down at the plateau of combat, holding a heulk ishi in mi mano."