In some cases, the Germans have two parallel words, such as Computer/Rechner, Electrizität/Strom for example. What seems relevant to a go terms discussion is that the germanized words have the advantage that their meaning is easily intuited by a native speaker.

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

Japanese terminology has also adopted English words. That's why we have Mini Chugoku (Chinese) and Small Chinese fuseki.

Modern books also use a lot of borrowed English words for nonterms like "space" to make as large an area as possible.

"Vorhand" / "Sente", as well as "Nachhand" / "Gote" do have the same meaning, so using any of these is just a matter of style, or preference. However, this very special (board-) game vacabulary seems to have German roots.

I have found no Go book in English yet that would have used the term "forehand" (which seems to be limited to tennis).

So it was only natural that "Sente" and "Gote" were imported into the English language-area.
In the German language-area, however, there already existed technical terms, which entirely covered the meaning of the Japanese terms.

_________________
The really most difficult Go problem ever: https://igohatsuyoron120.de/index.htm
Igo Hatsuyōron #120 (really solved by KataGo)

Megalife (alt. Mega Life, Mega-Life) - Life that cannot be undone even with the opponent playing two moves in a row (i.e. you ignored one move).

This is a great tool for finding killing moves in life and death problems.

Conjecture: "If you can find a move that secures megalife for the opponent this must be played as a first move to kill."

I challenge you to come up with an example to disprove this!

I was explained this method by a Finnish 2d last July, and even though it is very useful, for some corner situations it's essentially not *that* useful, because sometimes there's no way to figure out continuations in the same way (sometimes you can think of moving twice again for the opponent, but sometimes can't)

_________________
Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

I wonder why there aren't more Russian phonetics for satellites and space craft, in English. They were obviously the first to coin those terms.

As a word, satellite is rather old and not Russian.

The translators of Korschelt rendered Vorhand as Upperhand (capitalized. too).

Ah! I have an idea. Foreplay!

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

How do you know the Russian word for satellite wasn't older, or the German word for automobile etc. I'm just not buying the hypothesis that English don't retranslate the scientific terminology, take Newton for example, he was just doing the best he could to use Leibniz's notation.

Sputnik.

But of course we had to find a different term.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Now if everyone will stop talking about satellites and space crafts, we can get back on the topic of personal go terminology

_________________
http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

I think this might be of the cases when it was done on purpose.
Cold war, arms race, iron curtain, Big-Frigging-Competition between east and west, and all that...

In some cases, it seems to me the English-speaking world went to great lengths to reject the Russian terminology and coin their own. For example - the russian word 'Kosmonaut'. When I was still reading this stuff in native, it struck me that in English-speaking literature this word was not used (even though it would have been natural - from cosmos) but instead there is the slightly artificial word Astronaut (from 'astro' = the star, which seems less logical than potential Cosmonaut.) Other examples can be found as well, although I think these days the screws have been loosened a little.

However, many space-related words are similar, although not being a scholar I have no clue what the common roots are or who 'borrowed' from whom. For example: Rocket/Rakieta, or Orbit/Orbita, etc.

_________________
- Bantari
______________________________________________
WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

I was going to call this the Sputnik Fuseki, but now I think that Nautilus is a better term.

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

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I believe RJ calls this 2-pass alive or pass alive, not sure which.



Pretty sure it's easy to find counterexamples to the "must" statement. If we relax your statement to "If white can achieve megalife by playing at A, then black at A kills." it's not so easy anymore. However, here's a pathological counterexample:

Click Here To Show Diagram Code

[go]$$B
$$ +-----------+
$$ | . . . . . |
$$ | X X X X . |
$$ | X O O X X |
$$ | X O . O O |
$$ | X O O X . |
$$ +-----------+[/go]

What's pathological about it is that the first move to kill is also the last. Also, the black move at the position that achieves megalife for white is only legal if we allow suicide, so, .. yeah.

1) Satellite to refer to man-made object in space is many centuries younger than satellite used to refer to an orbital body which is younger than its original Latin meaning. It's not an English term, it's just reusing an an existing term that came from Latin. This is my point, are you talking about the Russian equivalent of the first or second or third meaning? There's no reason to believe a priori that they did the same thing English speaking scientists did or that Russians use one word to cover the same selection of concepts that English speakers do...

2) English does have a lot of scientific words that it took from other languages. I'd go as far as to say most of them coined before the twentieth century and a good deal afterwards (there was a little bit of fuss over the calling quarks quarks due to it being a James Joyce reference rather than something in Greek or whatever) , I don't think anyone is disputing this.

There is no personal terminology, language is like wiki - there is no ownership of words. Even invented words are intended for communication, i.e. at least some other people need to understand and can potentially take up the words. This required initial understanding is part of the reason many new terms are derived from common language in one way or another and here the terms proposed by Robert often perform badly. I mean, any German-speaking Swiss at least (English maybe not) would instantly understand the relation between holes and cheese, but eyes and lakes, seriously?

However, I believe there should be Go terminology in each language, at least if you want to spread Go, and it isn't enough to parrot a few half-understood Japanese terms.

Advertisement break: Deutsche Gobegriffe

On the other hand you have to be careful in constructing your native terminology and without lifting more of the knowledge that is embedded in Japanese terminology, you may end with something much inferior that nobody will take up voluntarily.

Well the nice thing about using Japanese words is that we just argue about whether we should use Chinese ones instead given its a Chinese game rather than endless arguments about whether "lake" has the same connotations in English, German, French, Russian etc when trying to invent new vocabulary.

Actually, thinking about Kanin's conjecture, I'm starting to doubt whether there can be non-pathological counterexamples.
If white A gets megalife, then whatever black 1 will be, if it's not A, white 2 can just be at A.

Now the positions reached by reversing the move order of black 1 and white A have to differ, otherwise black 1 can't possibly kill (since white A first gets megalife).

And I suspect that's only possible if black 1 captures something. Or maybe there are other pathological counterexamples, where the living move white A is a suicide or something bizarre like that.

Originally, I tried pretty hard to stick to aping Japanese terms because I figured they were already standard. However, and I'm sure many others can atest - this sometimes leads to confusion when several parties aren't 100% sure what their Japanese word means and may be using it differently, or one party has a good idea but doesn't know the Japanese term to talk about it.

I really like (and use) breakfast's term 'tough' (not sure where it originated). I'm not 100% what the Japanese term is, but I feel the word tough captures the feeling very well and in my first language - no-nonsense, giving no ground, difficult, high stakes, a little desperate...


'Thickness' I think one could perhaps just throw away as an attempt at a direct translation from several distinct Japanese terms. I guess a wider wall could be more difficult to penetrate? But this metaphor is stretching considering a slightly spread out shape may in fact be thinner. Narrower.


An idea I flirt with is to try and wholesale adapt chess language (NB I am not a real chess player) because it is a bit grounded in western culture/lexicon.

While I was writing the word 'toughness' it occured to me that one could also wholesale adapt eg engineering language as a source of very specific words ('tough' would then be related to "the ability to absorb impact kinetic energy to fracture" or "ease of crack propagation" with the opposite of 'brittle').

_________________
Revisiting Go - Study Journal
My Programming Blog - About the evolution of my go bot.

stone difference
locale
fighting region

are examples of terms invented and used be me. They do not suffer from missing common language, but indeed they require initial understanding. This is so for all terms of whichever origin. I do not see that my terms are any different in this respect. Also terms from other origins need many years and much promotion effort, until at least a few players become used to them, e.g.,

the count
pass fight
haengma

A good percentage of new terms is useful mainly for players 2 kyu or stronger or seriously seeking such ranks. This slows down their spreading.