I found this on SL’s dan ranks page.
The low small pincer [from the 3-4] is known to some as the “dogleg”, a name apparently introduced by the people behind GoGoD.
Yesterday, or the day before, I learnt about the Latin suffix -men.
-men essentially means “thing” and creates a neuter noun of the third declension.
Here are some examples listed on Wiktionary, to give an idea.
| word | meaning | root |
|---|---|---|
| abdomen | " " | abdo (hide) [debated] |
| acumen | sharpened point | acuo (sharpen) |
| aeramen (LL) | copper, bronze | aes (" ") |
| affamen | a greeting | affor (speak to) |
| agmen | crowd | ago (do) |
| albumen | " " (egg white) | albus (white) |
| cantamen | spell | canto (sing) |
| catillamen | sweetmeat | catillo (lick a plate) |
| cavamen | cavern | cavo (hollow out) |
| certamen | contest | certo (struggle) |
| cerumen | earwax | cera (wax) |
| conamen | an effort | conor (try) |
| consolamen | consolation | consolor (console) |
So if to hane is haneo, a hane is hanamen; if to cut (kiri) is kirio, a cut is kiramen; if to shoulderhit (kata) is kato, a shoulderhit is katamen; if eyes are oculi then eyespace is oculamen; if stones are calculi then perhaps a group is a calculamen, and so on…
I was never quite satisfied with the available Latin words for group. I like calculamen.
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I ran into one of Fairbairn’s interesting turns of phrase on L19.
Shibano notes (…) the teiban (定番) joseki (…) A teiban (short for 定番商品) is a plain standard product that sells consistently well. We might call it the plain vanilla cornet
Jisho defines 定番 as standard; routine; regular; basic; staple.
Is this a real English word?
If it’s any help, this suffix is cognate to the Greek -μα.
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For now I’m watching lets play of 死印「しいん」 It’s a nice horror mystery story. In general I like the idea of learning language through visual novel lets plays. You get to listen to the text read out to you. That’s how I learned a big portion of English, especially the listening recognition portion.
I wish I could understand Cho Chikun comedy routines at some point.
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Our guy Luke has this method, which does involve a lot of reading and re-reading. Your approach is quite good.
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Some more English words
- ardent
- splendor - looks like it’s the same as splendid but rarely seen
- proffer
- oar - I maybe know this word but it’s not often I come across it. Probably to know all these nautical words I needed to read pirate stories in childhood in English. Then I’d know. But since I read them in Russian, I mostly familiar with Russian equivalents. For example, I know боцман but bosun or boatswain I learned not so long ago. Or helmsman, that one I remembered now too.
- bleve or BLEVE is a useful word to remember to google beautiful explosions
- graupel - visually reminds me of the word shrapnel, although these have nothing to do with each other
- dhyana - probably doesn’t even count as an English word
- reprove
- indomitable - quite a mouthful word
- indefatigable - surely this one is a made-up word
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splendor
Not that uncommon in my experience. In British English it’s splendour.
bleve or BLEVE
graupel
dhyana
All new to me.
Oh, and here’s one I reckon is new to you: splendiferous.
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Now that you mention it, splendour does look much more familiar compared to splendor.
- antsy - that’s a good word, means exactly what one expects
- diarrhoea - I just find “o” there weird, it looks so out of place
- vermilion - I’m not artistic person so I only know main colors and main names for those, and none of the weird names. For example, for cyan and magenta I only recognize that it’s a color but no specific color comes up in my head.
- cinnabar (red) - it’s a red rock
- obsequious
- servile
- ablution
- awl
- piteous
- listless - how did this one come about, I only know list might be an angle of a ship
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antsy
I thought it might have something to do with angsty, but on closer inspection the times and uses don’t entirely match up. angst was originally a medical term and arrived in English rather late.
diarrhoea - I just find “o” there weird, it looks so out of place
See also manoeuvre. The American spelling has no O.
vermilion / cinnabar
Both terms have been discussed before in this thread and elsewhere.
obsequious
From Latin obsequor – ob (to) sequor (follow), to follow towards.
Perhaps confusingly, ob can also mean against, as in obstruct.
servile
You can guess at the meaning by seeing that it derives from Latin servus, slave.
piteous
Synonym of the more common pitiful.
listless
Wiktionary suggests that list had, in Middle English, a sense of “desire”. It seems to be cognate to lust, so listless is comparable to lustless.
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Back in early 2004, some of us from the Singapore Weiqi Association held a Go exhibition in a local library, and introduced the game whenever someone appeared.
I guess most of the time I was teaching a father and his young son … it was the parent who kept bombarding me with questions thereby prolonging my introduction … the kind of answers that could satisfy his barrage of questions were those peppered with mathematical terms, such as “the connection of stones is transitive” …
As I ended my introduction, I asked the father and child to have a game. In no time the child captured more and more of the father’s stones, while the father exclaimed that he just could not see the captures coming. I suppose there must be a difference between how a child learns and how an adult learns, as many children tend to be sharper in recognizing capture opportunities compared to most adults when learning how to play weiqi. The father also commented that switching from an international chess mindset to a weiqi mindset is not easy.
– unkx90
I found this interesting, but I got triple-locked in the review meta-topic so I’ll leave it here.
I (re?-)learnt a new term: sougou fuseki.
Sougou fuseki is a term used for describing the beginnings of modern fuseki theory in the years 1935-1940, as a compromise was reached between classical theory and shin fuseki.
Sougou is a Japanese word meaning “synthesis”.
I learnt a new Japanese word: okappa (お河童) meaning “bob cut”.
[Ogawa Tomoko] became well known when she won the All-Japan Amateur Women’s Championship at the age of 14; her pageboy hairstyle (okappa) or bob cut added to her fame—she was called, not quite accurately, “the okappa Honinbo.”
AGA E-Journal, 7 December 2019
Its etymology is a reference to the kappa of Japanese folklore, with their distinctive pates.
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globulon [2015] – There seems to be some understandable confusion on these topics. I am a foreigner who has lived in Taipei for 3.5 years at this point, but I am married to a Taiwanese. I’m not a linguist or anything.
On the language question: Everything public is Mandarin. In schools everybody studies Mandarin. If you speak Mandarin you will have no problems getting around and interacting with people in most places you are likely to end up. (One slight source of confusion may come in if you speak just a bit of Mandarin because there are actually a lot of different ways of saying Chinese and China in Mandarin that don’t refer to different dialects etc but just have different flavor or emphasis on who they are including or excluding etc).
There is a dialect which in English we call Taiwanese (this is a bit confusing because you would expect this to be the official language of Taiwan but it’s not.) As has been pointed out below, this dialect originates from the Fujian province of the mainland. In Mandarin here in Taiwan it is referred to as Tai-Yu. The Hokkien name mentioned below is right for the family of regional dialects that Taiwanese is from but that’s not how Taiwanese people refer to the dialect that is spoken in Taiwan. I believe they are still pretty close but consult a linguist if it is important to you to get the details ironed out. This is way far and away the most common dialect after Mandarin throughout the island. It is possible but unlikely that you would meet people who speak only Taiwanese and don’t really speak Mandarin. This is more probable the more south and the more rural you get. On the other hand, in Taipei in particular there are plenty of people who speak Mandarin and do not speak Taiwanese.
It is true that the characters are traditional which means that they are more complex. For this reason it is likely to be easier to read the simplified if you already know the traditional rather than the other way around.
There are a good number of other dialects on the island, but it is quite unlikely that if you are just visiting the island that you would have anything to do with those dialects, let alone get into a situation where it was the only language option. (If you want to know there are actually a lot of Japanese speakers particularly in the older generation from the time of the occupation.)
Just for reference, in Taipei it is easy to get around without knowing any Mandarin or Traditional characters as many signs are in English and many people have some degree of English. Obviously it will limit what you can do but you can still have a great time.
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.”.