Controversial Opinion: Making counter arguments/statements in the Controversial Go opinion thread is okay. Let’s raise the heat a little!
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I think stories are important for building the motive to play at all. If the game wasn’t played by lots of other human beings with personal stories to make it meaningful, I wouldn’t play much.
That said, your criticism made me take Lessons in the Fundamentals off my wishlist.
Opnions here can shape the destiny of other’s relationship with go.
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AI tools are very useful, but only if you know what you’re doing. Seeing an AI suggestion and accepting it as truth without inspection will only make you worse! One must first self-analyze to make any sense out of AI review, then check the AI variations (not just the principal ones, look through all the potential problems you can think of) and don’t accept any conclusion you don’t have the reasoning to back up yourself in a game.
Perfect moves are useless if you don’t have the reasoning to back up any non-memorized variation.
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And the counter arguments should be controversial as well!
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I disagreeee!
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Controversial opinion: we should use the Korean pronunciation of 圍棋, wi-gi (위기), which is easier for westerners to approximate than “baduk” or “weiqi”, and probably closer to the original Chinese pronunciation anyway.
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I think tonal words would sound jarring in the flow of a casual English sentence.
You can’t expect Anglophones to pronounce 圍棋 wéiqí with two rising tones as well as Chinese consonants and vowels any more than you can ask the Chinese to discuss their “strengths” in equally faithful pronunciation.
The interpretation /weɪ’'t͡ʃiː/, aka “way-chee”, seems reasonable enough.
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Consider these examples from List of English words of Chinese origin - Wikipedia, showing how English has again and again discarded Chinese tonal information which was irrelevant in English.
Why should 圍棋 wéiqí be treated any differently?
| English word | Cantonese pron. |
|---|---|
| bok choi | baak6 coi3 |
| chow mein | chau2 mein6 |
| dim sum | dim2 sam1 |
| kowtow | kau3 tau4 |
| kung fu | gung1 fu1 |
| mahjong | ma4 jeung3 |
There are three pieces of information in Chinese phonology.
- Consonants
- Vowels
- Tones
Because Chinese languages have many monosyllabic words, tones are necessary to differentiate terms that would otherwise be homophonous. However, English has much fewer monosyllabic words and so the retention of tones is unnecessary.
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Not sure if you are responding to my post, but I don’t really expect Anglophones to do the tones (I certainly cant!) The beef I have is with the unfortunate transliteration. The pronunciation qi is not obvious for the uninitiated. Granted, words like “Qi” and “Qigong” are getting more common usage, but there are still many folks who would pronounce weiqi as “wei-kwi” without assistance.
I guess similar to baduk. If we spelled it paduk or padook, I probably wouldn’t find the Anglo pronunciation so… bleh.
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The pronunciation qi is not obvious for the uninitiated. Granted, words like “Qi” and “Qigong” are getting more common usage, but there are still many folks who would pronounce weiqi as “wei-kwi” without assistance.
Or /weɪ’kiː/ in the Arabic romanisation style, like in Al-Qaeda.
But pinyin ch represents a different sound in Chinese, which is the root of the issue.
If q was written ch as well, we wouldn’t know which original consonant was being represented.
Although it can be disputed whether that is necessary information in the context…
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Yep same thing for Korean. ㅂ is arguably better represented by ‘p’ at the beginning of a word, but then how does one differentiate from ㅍ? One reason I prefer McCune–Reischauer.
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not strictly a go opinion, but Mandarin phonology is amazing and more people should learn it (probably true of other dialects but I don’t know too much about them)
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People in the west (especially young white men) spend too much time learning Japanese terminology (especially focusing on pronouncing the words with a Japanese accent) and not enough learning the basics of the game.
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LOL. So unnecessary.
My second unpopular opinion is that hasbro should sell plastic 9x9 sets in Target and call the game “Stones” and only use English terminology in the written rules.
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LOL yes please. Interestingly, the word baduk may have an etymology meaning board+stones
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Unnecessary, but learning a language is fun!
I think I learnt Go because I was learning Japanese, not the other way around, though.
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