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?)

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And the go-fever which is more real than many doctors’ diseases, waked and raged...
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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.

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):

Mala grammatica TOSo non prohibentur.

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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...

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My blog with World Go news in Portuguese: Jornal do Go
The link to the Google Translation to English: Jornal Do Go

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

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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.

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My blog with World Go news in Portuguese: Jornal do Go
The link to the Google Translation to English: Jornal Do Go

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

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.

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