When I was an active print journalist I went to very many press conferences. I was amused but perplexed at how often colleagues from the broadcasting media would try to get the event re-labelled as a news conference. There we were, queuing up to ask Thatcher or Gorbie a question, and some guys were bouncing up and down instead about such a trivial issue.

I thought of that with a start this week when reading thorugh some old Kidos. As ever, T Mark is beavering away transcribing games, and one current batch is games from the 1950s (two new Kitani games for the GoGoD database due for a new issue next month!). I do the easy bit of topping and tailing them with the the tournament details etc. As I go through the magazines I also get the tasty end of the lollipop by being able to browse through the non-game pages. One feature that caught my eye was a long series on terms - not so much what they mean but why they exist. I had always known that the early 20th century saw an explosion in go terms as part of the popularisation of the game, along with the surge in books. Most stuck, though many terms you now know would have left Shusaku looking blank.

What I had not not appreciated before though, being a scribe with inky fingers rather than a man with a mike, was that many terms developed, and developed the way they did, because of the need to describe games on the radio. Word pictures were needed. Loving, as I do, listening to cricket on Test Match Special or to the likes of Vin Scully on baseball radio, I felt entranced enough by this new insight to do two things.

One was to present the little quiz below. This is to do with a move where you add a stone next to one of the same colour in a straight line. Many people call this nobi. Occasionally they are right. More often it's something else. You will see the vast range of possibilities as you work through the answers. I wouldn't expect many people to get more than a few, but that's not really the point. I just want to share a little bit of unsual go history which may possibly change your thinking about the value of go terms.

Incidentally, when magnetic go boards first came out, one of their big selling points was that they were ideal for listening to games on the radio (a game could be spread over several broadcasts, so being able to store the position was a boon). The same facility applied to newspaper games, of course, but the 1930s had their equivalent of iPadders and radio was the thing was that was going to change the way go was played for ever...

The task in the quiz is simply to give the Japanese name for all numbered moves shown. There is not always 100% agreement among pros, but these were deemed near enough universal by go writer Mihori Sho. Mihori's terms are given in the Show/Hide portion.

The other thing I did was to write a piece for the GoGoD Concepts Library on the life and death (and reincarnation) of one of those many go terms that were commonly labelled "used by professionals" and considered too hard for the average amateur. Amashi is one such. This new one, deep valleys, is another, but far less useful. However, I don't believe that everything in go has to be utilitarian, and I offer it mainly as an entertaining look at one of the bywaters of the game. Radio days are here again!

The link is: http://www.gogod.co.uk/Concepts/Concepts.htm, then scroll down to Deep Valleys.

The summer 2011 GoGoD CD will have several more of the quizzes shown below, for other types of move.

I had not realized that those were links in the concepts page. The last time I looked at them, I thought they were just outlines of material on the CD.

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Occupy Babel!

We've all heard the urban legend that Eskimos have many words for snow due to it's importance up there, and I assume that similarly the Japanese have good reason to use so many words for what appears to us weak-at-go westerners to be one concept. Being able to linguistically differentiate such moves might also help us better understand the game. For some of the moves (Iron pillar) there is already an English term, but for others apparently not. Is this a case in which it is more appropriate to learn the specialized Japanese terms, or may we hope that John might offer us a few translations?

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Patience, grasshopper.

I see a push, a bump, a stretch, a turn, a descent, a pullback, a block, an extension, a connection, and maybe a few things i'd only describe as 'nobi'. Western terminology is about as detailed as it needs to be.

Perhaps I ought to have made explicit the point that all the words would mean something to a Japanese from the ordinary language (sagaru = drop down, hiku= retreat, tsukiataru = dunsh into*, etc). As to whether it's useful to learn all of them, I'd say we have enough trouble with the ones we've already imported (shimari here is probably a surprise to many).

Nevertheless, Mihori and others do frequently make the point that using a wealth of terms like this does help with reading and visualising a position. Even if they are right, though, I think we'd do better to use English descriptive terms.

*Aah divven knaa whae she is, bonny lass, but Aah'm gannin tae show a bit of solidarity wi wor Cheryl. Yanks bashin Brits agyen.

Interesting!

Out of interest: I've always seen (for example in translations of Sakata's "Middle Game of Go" and Van Zeijst's "Making Good Shape") the spellings "hiki", "magari" and "tsuki-atari". Is the trailing "u" a recent change in transliteration?

And does the second part of "tsukiataru" have a different meaning than the word "atari"?

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My name is Gijs, from Utrecht, NL.

When in doubt, play the most aggressive move

Strange Japanese terms have always amused me. I do not think that they are particularly useful, so I invented a limited number of names for move / stone types in Joseki / Fundamentals. Basically terms should express meaning or reason (like connection), major move type (like block), if necessary more specialized subtype (like corner block) and, where useful, direction (corner). This gives useful phrases with easily understood meaning, like 'connecting corner block'.

I got most of these right but I do read Japanese and use a lot of Japanese books and commentaries. I had Tetchu for B. How is that different from burasagari?

As a discussion point I'd say that the "two stones in a row along a line" type of description only refers to a shape while most of the various Japanese term refer to a function. I can see how that mode of description would be better for radio broadcast but it's also good in other cases because it draws attention to the reason for playing the move.

There is no change in transliteration, but the Japanese forms are verbal forms, the conjugation of which is shown by changing the endings. The form -i (sometimes -e as in ate) is a gerund which doubles up as a verbal noun. The -u form is (simplifying) the present tense. Mihori discriminated between -i and -u forms for what would be esoteric reasons here, so I won't go into that.

However, the distinction is not otiose even in English. A verbal noun (doing) retains its verbiness and thus conveys a dynamic feel which is lost in the noun-oriented English equivalent. It's easy to make too much of this, but the feel of a what a Japanese pro says in Japanese is often rather different from what it feels like in English translation. For a single term it makes no difference, but over the whole lexicon it all mounts up. In the days of rec.games.go I made the point that westerners may be harmed by thinking of good shape as a static concept, when it is really embedded in a dynamic context and so has a dynamic nuance itself (in this case the -i at the end of katachi, or suji, does not denote a verbal noun, it's the context). It's often better also to think of sabaki as a process rather than as a result (we say make sabaki/achieve sabaki and that can be slightly off). As one way of understanding the difference in feeling, perhaps I can use programming. You can write a perfectly good program for almost anything in, say, old-fashioned Pascal. But if you graduate up to an OOP language, you feel (eventually) more like it's the real thing, and you can make smoother progress. I happen to believe that Japanese readers have that sort of advantage. This is part of why I always try to promote the use of English terms: so that we can progress from simple linear programming to OOP.

Atari and the atari in tsukiatari are the same (= hit). All the -u forms in Mihori's list can be changed to an -i form if you prefer, but do remember they are verbal nouns.

It's not, but that's what the answer already said (burasagari aka iron pillar). FWIW I think burasagari is more than a tad more common.

John,

You may be right, but it seems to me that if the Japanese have more technical terms, it is because experience has led them to better differentiate between similar situations. If this helps with visualization as John's reply suggests, I'd say we should do our best to understand and name these subtle differences.

Here's an attempt from a non-Japanese-speaking weak go player to put the terms into English. Improvements welcome!

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Patience, grasshopper.

thick extension



Shimari and corner block are two very different ways of protecting the corner.



corner block or thick corner block



center block or thick center block



connecting block or thick connecting block or connecting edge block or thick connecting edge block



thick extension (towards the corner)



thick extension (towards the upper side (and the center))



thick string connection

It is not a turn; a turn leaves behind a cutting point.



threat to cut



cutting block



thick extension (towards the center)

etc.

daal: Your list of suggested English terms comes over as one from a native speaker. Robert's comes over as one from a non-native. The difference is one of intuition. You have grasped the verbal noun idea by using many words (e.g. turn) that can be used as either a noun or as a verb, which means we capture the essence of the Japanese term. Further, most of these words can be used with idiomatic complements that add to the feeling of dynamism (e.g. bend round, jump up, push along).

However, we've been through all this before on rec.games.go and it seems impossible to get agreement. For example, turn (where Robert is quite wrong to be so emphatic). There was no agreement on whether which of turn or bend signified magari or hane, not to mention other suggestions such as curl round. There was similar disagreement over peek and poke. It's a shame because I really do think there's a way forward for western go through the go vocabulary.

(Oyogi is a term that is not agreed on by pros - some use it for a kind of edge jump. But the idea is that it is a more adventurous sally into enemy territory than a hai=crawl)

I do not see the difference as one of native vs. non-native or of knowing or not knowing Japanese - I see it as spoilt vs. not spoilt with descriptions for the shape context place of a move or stone. E.g., if a move type is 'connection', then I do not care in the term whether opposing stones are touching the player's stone. What matters is that the stone does provide connection. If more information is needed, then it must describe how safe the connection is and optionally how big the value of, e.g., the connected group is. Anything else is of only tertiary relevance and therefore should be avoided in regular go terms.

Hence meaning is the most relevant. Terms should express meaning as clearly as possible. Not arbitrary meaning but the most relevant meaning.

I agree that terms play a great role for understanding. Good terms. Bad terms, however, hinder easy understanding.

I think to ignore the connotation of words is a great hindrance in trying to properly define purpose or feel of a move, and certainly relevant to the terminology used (though admittedly it does make it tougher for non-native speakers if a good translation can't be found). Likewise to call connotative meaning arbitrary seems a bit naive. In many cases picking the right word is the perfect way to succinctly capture intricate details in a situation. My knowledge of Japanese is pretty much limited to what I learned from go, so I won't even try on those terms, but I can think of a few English examples --

For instance cut vs. severed. Even though the definitions are virtually the same, if someone described a position as "black's group has been cut" I would think it just means they are separated, where as "black's group has been severed" I would think it implies a sizable piece of a larger group has been cut off and will die. Similarly impede, block, or plug. Impede would imply the opponent still progresses (albeit slower), block would imply they have been diverted or stopped, plug would be not only stopping them, but doing so in an area where they were pushing between two of the opponent's positions. If you were to insist on saying "Black plays so as to completely blocks white's advance in an area where black is strong on two sides and white is pushing through the middle" instead of "Black plugs the gap" it would not only be more cumbersome to describe a position, but it would likely be more difficult, more confusing for the reader, and would potentially fail to convey fully the subtlety of the position.

Words, phrases or sentences can be as short or detailed as necessary. If the question is "Is the group alive?", then an answer might be "Yes, because it is connected to another live group." Here the implied "safely connected" or (in my terminology) "directly connected" quality does not need to be stated explicitly. If the question is "How good is the connection?", then some quality has to be stated in an answer.



Using too many different common language words makes understanding difficult because every two speakers imagine different things when a word is applied to Go and it becomes difficult to recognize which are the terms. It is much better to use well agreed upon or defined terms. Where necessary, those terms should be varied (like direct versus indirect connection) or qualified by easily understood standard adjectives: good connection, very good connection, bad connection.

@ Robert

While some of my suggestions were perhaps inaccurate, I am somewhat surprised to hear you objecting to standard terms such as "retreat" or "stand." Also your objection to "turn" (think: "thousand dollar turn") seems call into question standard practice in favor of your own somewhat awkward inventions.

I call them awkward not because they are inaccurate, but rather because they rely strictly on nouns and adjectives to describe the functions of the stones which I suspect leads to sentences that are difficult to read and to visualize. Compare: "Black turns at 1" with "Black 1 is a thick string connection." No, I have a better idea: Ask one of your students to compare the two.

It is no less accurate to say "Tom was the assailant and Michael was the victim" than to say "Tom hit Michael," but the latter is more vivid, inviting the reader to visualize the situation. This is something that writers do in order to get their point across better.

While it is logical to view go stones as static entities, it is common practice to describe the relationship of newly played stones to existing ones in terms of motion. We speak of jumping and crawling and pressing for example. While this may seem odd at first glance, to anyone familiar with the game it makes perfect sense. We see a go game as something dynamic. As such, the most powerful words to express this are verbs.

I would also like to question another of your objections, that the shape context does not interest you and spoils the descriptive value of a term. One of the reasons stated by John for differentiating between moves, is in order to better visualize the actions taking place. For this purpose, the shape context is anything but irrelevant.

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Patience, grasshopper.

As I recall, poke is the invention of one English writer who felt that peep or peek carried a sexual connotation, e. g., Peeping Tom. peep show. (Apparently unaware of any sexual connotation of poke.) I was unaware of poke gaining any currency.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Well, Facebook also thought it was a bad idea.