Language Learners' Library

I was reading the old SL discussion of Lee Sedol vs Yi Se-tol and came across this interesting comment by Uberdude, from 2016 (the year, ofc, of AG–Lee).

The wikipedia page on the surname Lee says: “National Institute of the Korean Language … recommended that people who bore this surname should spell it Yi in the Roman alphabet. The overwhelming majority of South Koreans with this surname ignored this recommendation and continue to spell it as Lee. In a study based on 2007 application data for South Korean passports, it was found that 98.5% of people with this surname spelled it in Latin letters as Lee in their passports, while only 1.0% spelled it Yi.”.

I don’t know the complete etymology of the use of hoshi for the special spots on the go board but there may be some ancient astrological association with points on the go board. By the way, a second meaning of hoshi is “a spot”, which agrees with the go board use. In recording wins and losses on a tournament chart in Japan, a small solid black circle is used for a loss and an open, white, circle is used for a win. These are referred to with the words kuroboshi or shiroboshi. Incidentally the “star” points were marked by a small flower symbol on ancient Korean boards and they are known as “flower points” in Korean.

– anonymous SL contributor, 2011

There are at least one or two photos of boards with flower hoshi in the olden times thread.

Someone on a forum elsewhere has been discussing “viscous go”. I think it’s a typo for “vicious”, but it’s still an interesting idea… Mozart, in some of his letters, described how he wanted his music to “flow like oil”. It’s an image that initially surprised me–I normally think of water as flowing, but oil as more oozing–but it makes sense. A watery flow can splash and easily become messy, whereas a viscous flow embodies a certain sort of smoothness and connectedness. I think in my next few games I will try to play “viscous go”!

– xela, 2007 (SL)

Recently I’ve been using the terms syrupy and treacly for particularly thick and steady moves.

Could anyone tell me anything interesting about this one?

Yunzi … is short for “Yunnan qizi (云南棋子)”, which means weiqi stones from Yunnan province.

– Niklaus, Unusual Materials, SL

Surprisingly, this etymological information isn’t presented on the yunzi page.

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https://senseis.xmp.net/?MetaphoricalNamesForTheGameOfGo

  • 手談 shudan, hand talk

  • 爛柯 ranka, rotted axe handle
    (From the tale of a woodcutter who, captivated by a game of Go played between Immortals, didn’t notice that so much time had passed that the handle of his axe had rotted away. Name of the Ranka Yearbook of the IGF.)

  • 烏鷺 uro, crow and heron
    (From the colours. This name is alluded to by the illustration on the cover of Tagaisen Joseki Shinpyo.)

  • 方円 houen, square and circles. This is the word in Hoensha.

  • 坐隠 zain, sitting hermits. As in Zain Danso.

  • 忘憂 bouyuu, forgetting worries

Something to consider when the debate over the crowded searchspace of go comes up: we could always call the game by one of these names instead.

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Note that 菫 is denoted with furigana. I have an impression that sumire is a rare color kanji. I think I’ve seen people trip up over that kanji.

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Jisho gives it as violet.

I’ve commented before, I think in this very thread, about the fact that Violet is an English name as well.

I found this 15k frequency list A 15,000 Japanese Word Frequency List

It doesn’t appear to be there.

But 15k list isn’t enough anyway. If you scroll down to the rarest words on the list, you can see things like 本性 or 絶叫 or 偽物 or even 平ら which don’t look like rare words.

Another thing to check is kanji frequency lists.

https://scriptin.github.io/kanji-frequency/

It’s there. 2836 out of 6118. So outside of “learn 2000 kanji” and you’re good proverb.

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That’s a proverb?

2,000 doesn’t even cover all the Joyo.

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But it’s almost 2000 so you often see that 2000 is good enough. But how good is it if you can’t even write Sumire’s name.

On the topic of cinnabar, I found this video where a person is trying to do something or other: experiments with Cinnabar - YouTube

Ko Fight Club, 15 October 2002

I couldn’t find any reference to this book.

The title would be strangely uninformative since quibus means merely “that”.

He adds:

For further info, I recommend Jaap K. Blom’s fascinating articles about go in 17th and 18th century Europe, originally published in Go World and reproduced in The Go Player’s Almanac 2001.

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I learned a fun new word that might be useful to others here:

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It should be “annotatio de quibusdam libris”. That turns up at least bibliograhical references (to what looks like a contribution to the proceedings of the Royal Berlin Academy in 1710).

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This has become an interesting point for me lately, as Korean romanisation on Sensei’s Library is pretty unstandardised (despite an almost-nominal policy of McCune–Reischauer) so it’s easy to add a “new professional” who is really already present under a differently-romanised article name.

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I noticed recently that some Chinese forenames are made from a reduplicated character.

Examples:

张佩佩 Zhang Peipei
殷明明 Yin Mingming (Stephanie Yin)
杨棋棋 Yang Qiqi

There are also examples of the same “syllable” with different characters and perhaps different tones:

葛凡帆 Ge Fanfan
金茜倩 Jin Qianqian

Also, hard to give your kid a more Go-ish name than 棋棋, eh?

Found another one: 马媛媛 Ma Yuanyuan

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A very interesting article.

tl;dr old Chinese families have “generational poems”: the first character in the given name of members of each consecutive generation was taken from each successive character of the poem. This was influenced by the Chinese naming taboo, which is the opposite of traditional European practice: that it’s considered disrespectful to name a child after their parent or one of their ancestors.

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Let’s get my notes out of the way.

  1. weary - if only I knew why did I write down this word, I’m sure there was a reason, but what was it.

  2. languid

  3. germinate - sounds like a process of germs procreating, haha

  4. consanguinity - ok, this makes sense

  5. luxuriantly - this one appears to be usually applied to vegetation and bushes and things

  6. shoal - this is both fish swimming together and shallow waters where you might see them. I don’t particularly like the ambiguity

  7. promontory - oh, this is just a cliff, basically, I see

  8. abate - this is a sort of smug sounding word

  9. dike - I see, this is like a defense against floods and things like embankment are the same.

  10. levee - and this one is similar too.

  11. superfluity - this seems like an unnecessary word

  12. sericulture - I think a lot of industries have special non-obvious names.

  13. belfry - I found the wikipedia article quite useful Steeple - Wikipedia

  14. tumulus (mound) - in Russian we have kurgan.

  15. fief - again, when it comes to government hierarchies, they all use these obscure names

  16. frolic - this certainly doesn’t look like a word

  17. furrow - ok, this is fine

  18. 班 斑 - these have similar shape so it’s good to put them next to one another

  19. I also confuse 逸れる and 免れる

  20. 根幹 - this one I certainly wrote down because I was confusing it with another word, but I forgot what that word was

  21. These look kinda similar 梢 蛸 稍 but at least they appear to have some logic. More annoyingly they can be written with drops up and down:
    image

  22. These certainly are easy to mix up, especially in small print: 宥める(なだめる) 窘める(たしなめる)

  23. I like this one: 繭

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languid

From Latin languidus, the adjective of the verb langueo (to be weak, listless).

promontory - oh, this is just a cliff

There’s also headland.

sericulture

From Latin sericum, silk and other Chinese wares. An interesting side quote from Wiktionary:

"Seres: The northern Chinese people reached via the overland Silk Road to Chang’an (Xi’an), unknown at the time to be related to the Sinae reached via the maritime Silk Road to Panyu (Guangzhou).

I’m skeptical of that, unless these “northern Chinese” were really some variety of Mongolians, Turkic people or other Central Asians with a whole different appearance and language family (which is not an unreasonable suggestion).

frolic - this certainly doesn’t look like a word

Perhaps because it has no k to pair with its final c. Historically a spelling frolick has been in use, but at some point became nonstandard. My guess is that this happened by analogy with adjectives that end in -ic, derived from Latin -icus, eg. bucolic. However, frolic is apparently of Dutch origin, from vrolijk.

No really obscure words in today’s haul.

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