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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 dictionaryof 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
