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
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手談 shudan, hand talk
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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.
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坐隠 zain, sitting hermits. As in Zain Danso.
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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.
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weary - if only I knew why did I write down this word, I’m sure there was a reason, but what was it.
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languid
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germinate - sounds like a process of germs procreating, haha
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consanguinity - ok, this makes sense
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luxuriantly - this one appears to be usually applied to vegetation and bushes and things
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shoal - this is both fish swimming together and shallow waters where you might see them. I don’t particularly like the ambiguity
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promontory - oh, this is just a cliff, basically, I see
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abate - this is a sort of smug sounding word
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dike - I see, this is like a defense against floods and things like embankment are the same.
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levee - and this one is similar too.
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superfluity - this seems like an unnecessary word
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sericulture - I think a lot of industries have special non-obvious names.
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belfry - I found the wikipedia article quite useful Steeple - Wikipedia
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tumulus (mound) - in Russian we have kurgan.
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fief - again, when it comes to government hierarchies, they all use these obscure names
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frolic - this certainly doesn’t look like a word
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furrow - ok, this is fine
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班 斑 - these have similar shape so it’s good to put them next to one another
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I also confuse 逸れる and 免れる
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根幹 - this one I certainly wrote down because I was confusing it with another word, but I forgot what that word was
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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:
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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)
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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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In all occasions (half-point, half-eye etc. in CN, JP, KR) where the editors wanted to print the character 半 (Chin.: bàn half) they wrote a wrong character. The first two (inclined) strokes are wrongly turned by 90 deg., resp. left and right strokes are exchanged.
I.e., the inclined characters look like in 尘 chén (dust / dirt / earth) while the vertical/horizontal strokes remain the same.The funny thing is, that such a character does not seem to exist in Chinese (and I suspect neither in Japanese, I checked “2001 Kanji” by De Roo). The question is, how do you produce a Kanji that does not exist? (not with Unicode, I guess).
Correction: I have several fantizi-jiantizi conversion tables.
None shows above character. Two 40 year old Chinese having had their university education in China (proving their literacy) told me that they would not know this character. However, a British, teaching Chinese history in Leiden told me that it does exist (although being archaic, obsolete?).
- Indeed my Taiwanese copy of Matthews’ Chinese-English dictionary of 1931 (sic) shows this character with the different inclinations (and in all other composites too).
Similarly, these two books show this particular form of the character:
- “Analysis of Chinese Characters” by G.D. Wilder & J.H. Ingram, Dover 1974, unabridged republication of 2nd ed. of College of Chinese Studies in China 1934, 1st ed. 1922 (sic) and
- "Chinese Characters - Their origin, etymology, history, classification and signification " by Dr. L. Wieger (or. French), Dover 1966, unabridged and unaltered republication of 2nd ed. publ. by Catholic Mission Press in 1927 (1st ed. 1915)
– tderz, 2005, SL; in discussion of the book Contemporary Go Terms
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Found another word English shares with Dutch: winter.
There’s also zomer (summer) which is fairly obvious, and lente (spring), related to Lent. Old English lencten apparently also retained this broader meaning.
… in Japan, historically, we can go back to kurai, as first recorded in the excellent advice of Honinbo Sanetsu in the early 17th century. He points to the defective way of playing called kuraizume, which effectively means too much influence/thickness.
I like that term. It’s rather more smooth than “over-influential position”.
The Chinese-style phrase “empty stomach centre” is also appealing.