From: wchen@beirut.berkeley.edu (William Chen)
Subject: Re: naming conventions
Organization: U.C. Berkeley Math. Department.
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 02:07:45 GMT

In article <8318@charon.cwi.nl> jansteen@cwi.nl (Jan van der Steen) writes:
>lifq274@utxvms.cc.utexas.edu writes:
>
> > Regarding all this naming stuff, I must tell this story:
>
> > I heard about a player who, at some point in his studies of GO would
> > not play any move unless he knew the Japanese name for it.  Everyone
> > thought it was silly, but it turned out that all the good moves had
> > names, and all the useless moves did not.
>
>Very interesting approach, I'll try it out :).

Although I believe the most important thing for a beginner is to develop 
general priciples about which moves are strong and weak, and try to understand
why such moves are so.  The Japanese terminology for specific types of 
moves can come later when the player starts actively reading the literature.
Then the player will gradually pick up the Japanese terms when he understands
the ideas behind the moves.

In my mathematics studies as an undergraduate, I often got into the bad habit
of not paying enough attention to terminology.  I remember taking introductory
topolgy with my roomate and we would refer to all theorems as "that bogus
theorem"  (actually another word was used but it's not printable in a family
newsgroup)  Discussions of homework would proceed like "yeah we apply that
bogus theorem about stupid points in lame maps from a ball to itself."
"Oh! so it's a bogus subspace of a bogus space so it's Banach."  Of course
we understood what was going on (math is 95% visualization anyway) but 
this really annoyed some other students in the class.  However, once one
starts reading papers and doing research, one realizes the importance 
of knowing the terminology.  

[You're digressing, Bill!!-- get back to your original point!!!]
 
>
>Which also reminds me of another phenomenom:
>
>When studying a Go game (let's say a pro-pro game) one can test
>the perception of the game by trying to replay it by hard. The moves
>which slipped your mind most likely were the ones which you didn't fully
>understand.

>
> > It seems to me that borrowing words from other languages is not such a
> > bad idea.  I mean in the US we say 'taco', not 'thin flour bread-like
> > substance with ground meat and cheese'.
>


>Agree, the reason being that the word 'taco' actually is a concept for
>the dish you described so well. When there is concensus about the
>meaning of the word 'taco' why not use it, agree.
>
>But in Go all those words for concepts like 'miai', 'honte' and
>'shimari' are useless in conversation once one of the participants
>involved doesn't know/understand them.  For example, when explaining Go
>to beginners we need translations of those concepts in an
>understandable language (most likely the native language) to ensure the
>best possible communication.

Also a translation for each term is also helpful in crystalizing the 
concept--although this is not always availiable.  I played many games of go
with Professor Kimura at Washington University the last two summers and his 
explainations of some of the terms were pretty enlightening. For example he 
pointed out that one translation of atari was "to hit"  this made an 
impression on me.  Also, for example the Chinese word for sente (I'm not
even going to attempt to write the phoenetics in English)  is two 
syllables literally meaning "first hand" but can also mean first opportunity
(or just opportunity) gote can be translated as "last hand" or "second hand."


>
>Once someone understands a concept, he will be urged start using it
>since it will save him a lot of typing/talking:

Also since he sees others using the terminology.

>
> > Let's just use the words in Japanese like we always have, and use the
> > translations for Chinese speakers -- what's the big deal?
> >
> >					--Jason
> >					--1 kyu Go player
> >					--4 dan linguist (really)
>
>	Jan van der Steen
>	3 dan Go player
>	NR linguist
>
        William Chen
          stagnant at 1-2 dan Go player for the last 20 months
          40 kyu linguist 
          studying to be a math pro dan.