About Afrikaans, I just can't help but love a language which contains words like "hijsbakkie". It's a disrespectful and completely accurate description of what an elevator does. It's beautiful pragmatism.

"hoisting box" is so much easier to understand than "elevator", which only makes sense to people who know Latin.

Um, "to elevate" is a more common verb in English than "to hoist" is. Actually, "hoisting box" is rather ambiguous in meaning to me.

Don't you like the image of two guys pulling a rope to get the box up? Elevator seems so impersonal to me.

You know we use "lift" too (I'd never say elevator)? Finding the word for an inanimate object impersonal is strange to me.

That is why its real name in English is a Lift.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Will we take the lift to the flat?

Things like that are why I say I am bilingual.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

I think we've reached the point of faffing about for a laugh, here.

Afrikaans (usually but somewhat controversially described as a creole form of Dutch) does not normally use the "ij" form of that sounds, so it's just "hysbak". Also, the "kie" ending is a diminutive form, possibly also used to indicate affection, casualness or as an affectation. A bit hard to think of an example where an elevator would be used in a casual or affectionate way: "I just popped into the ol' elevator on my way to the vault" seems like an unlikely sentence, ever.

Personally, I don't find strict classifications of "bilingual", "fluent", etc., to be all that useful. In go, you can get a rank based on game results, so it is easy to classify. It's harder to do with language level. Maybe you can use language test results, or count vocabulary words you know, but it's hard to classify well, in my opinion.

Kind of like trying to say somebody is "1d at being funny" - how do you measure that? It's all quite subjective, and the answers you get will depend on who you ask.

Nonetheless, from this thread, it would see, to me that there is at least a correlation between interest in discussing go, and interest in discussing language

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be immersed

Some pros (stand-up comedians) actually measured how many laughs from the audience, per minute, from various performers.
They did it to see how they compare with their colleagues/competitors.
( The top people could average something like 7 laughs per minute -- I forget the exact number -- for an hour or more -- that's very difficult to achieve, and a ton of work. )
Comedy stores would know who to book.
Naturally, you get some sort of distribution curve.
Re: Comedian,
Darrell Hammond's book
For movies, there's the gross from the box office, and online sales.
People can be quite ingenious to come up all kinds of measurements,
in their respective fields.
Most of the top people (comedians, at least) work very hard to get there.

There have the problem in a nutshell! Language training is suffering from just this at the moment. Companies want to be able to MEASURE the progress that students make (even over 20 or 30 hours of classes). In order to try to do that, they invent metrics (like the TOEIC test) to measure levels before and after the course. In order to show progress, the teacher needs to get them to practice the things that will be tested....EVEN IF that's not what people need to learn for theirjob (the whole reason for the classes!).

Take something very complex like language learning...and if you formalize it too much, the very essence of it slips away.

Maybe the same with Go?

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Working on losing those 100 first games...one horrible fiasco at a time...

That is exactly what has happened to high school education in the USA!

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

There was a post Civil War Congressman known as Private John Allen, who was known for his wit. His initial speech in Congress, in favor of establishing federal fish hatcheries, lasted around 2 1/2 minutes. According to the Congressional Record, it was interrupted by "Laughter", "Renewed laughter", and "Great laughter" 26 times.

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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.

With go we hardly know, as go teaching has hardly been formalized. Over the past two centuries or so, some aspects of go have been partially formalized, but they are generally considered advanced topics.

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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.

Oh GOOD! I didn't start playing too late then...phew!

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Working on losing those 100 first games...one horrible fiasco at a time...

You gave me an orgasm of an idea Kadobans seem to be more suitable for club play than the kyu-dan ranking system; this system works best in a school setting where there are instructors to supervise closely the student's progress. However, some school instructors may instead prefer to rate student's progress using a numerical averages system. In the case of Go said system can determine progress based on wins & losses and average margin of each victory or defeat.

I'll propose kadoban to my club president and see what he says. I am sure that he will accept, if he has not done so already.

Germanic languages tend to describe modern concepts in this manner. For instance, the German word for television, fernsehen, literally means "to see (from) far". Had English continued retaining its Germanic roots to the same degree as the other Germanic languages - instead of taking on a large Latin-based lexicon after the Norman invasion of 1066 - today television would be known by the word Feorrsīen, or " the Far-seeing".

Perhaps "liftcar" and "hoistbasket" are good alternatives to the word elevator in English.

And we might call go steinclicken.

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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.