John Fairbairn wrote:Well, John, since Japanese amateurs also confuse yose with shuban, I think you have an uphill battle.
Bill: You keep saying that and I keep letting it go, but it's wrong. All (almost) endgame plays are yose, but not all yose moves occur in the endgame.
Thus in the endgame (final moves) phase it is perfectly legit for them to talk about yose, which, don't forget, has a clear and relevant meaning (pulling together) for them in their ordinary language - it's not an out-and-out technical term for them as it is for us.
And when they see a reference to yose in the opening or middle game, you do NOT hear them cry, "Hey, I'm confused!"
Well, John, there are a couple of things in the background to clear up. First, there are prescriptive linguistics and descriptive linguistics. AFAICT, as far as go terms are concerned, we both fall in between pure prescriptive linguistics and pure descriptive linguistics, but my impression is that I am closer to descriptive linguistics than you are. Second, words, even technical terms, have more than one meaning, and speakers switch between them, usually effortlessly.
One example in go is
ji in Japanese, territory in English. In each language the term has a specific technical meaning in the rules, which applies after play is over. But there is also a related, non-technical, fuzzy meaning which applies while the game is still going on. Thus, players can refer to (effective) plays inside the opponent's territory. In the technical meaning there can be no such effective play; there may be sente which do not alter the score, but that's it. Nobody except a rules lawyer would object to the non-technical meaning and insist that what people are calling territory actually is not.
There are also a number of meanings of sente and gote. There is a technical meaning of sente under which double sente which gain points do not exist. The failure to distinguish between different meanings of sente and gote has caused confusion and misunderstanding.
Now, as an amateur descriptive linguist I observed Japanese amateur go players use the term,
yose, to refer to the endgame. They never used the term,
shuban, at all. To the best of my recollection some of them and probably all of term used yose to refer to boundary plays before the endgame, as well as boundary plays in the endgame. They switched effortlessly between these two meanings, as human speakers do. I only learned the term, shuban, later on, through reading. It is not just I who have noted the meaning of the endgame of go for yose, Japanese lexicographers have, as well. It appears in Japanese dictionaries. To be sure, these are not lexicons of the technical terms of go, but I believe that they do reflect the non-technical language of Japanese amateur go players.
Now, I support you in spreading the word about the technical meaning of yose as boundary play, but I am too much of a descriptivist to support the idea that foreigners should observe niceties that native speakers do not.
Edit: When I said that Japanese amateurs confused yose with shuban, I did not mean that they were confused, I meant that they failed to make a distinction between the two.
Also, as far as multiple meanings of a word are concerned, this is more likely to occur and less likely to cause a problem when the two meanings apply to different kinds of things. That is the case with yose as a play and yose as a phase of the game. It makes perfect sense to refer to a yose (play) occurring before the yose (phase of the game). Speakers switch between the two meanings with ease. They do not get confused.
