Siptan / Discussion

Discussion on tournament and cup name

John F The tournament as yet has no name. Only the cup has been named, and it is the Wonik Cup. The sponsors are the Wonik Group (www.wonik.com). In McC-R it is Weon-ik. The company itself uses both Wonik and Won Ik as its English name.

Steve Is this version satisfactory?

John F. It's not really for me to say, but I can tell you GoGoD's policy, which is followed by many - Go World and other databases, for example.

With players' names we use a basic form of McCune-Reischauer (no sound changes) so that it is always possible to go back to the definitive hangeul version of the name, irrespective of the idiosyncratic other versions that exist (though we do also record these in our Onomasticon).

With tournament names we try to follow the name preferred by the sponsor (hence, Samsumg, Cheongkwanjang, Hungchang, Paengnam etc - and if it comes to that, Ricoh in Japan, Leino in China). The thinking here is (a) the name may be idiosyncratic but it is probably registered as the legal English name and may even be well known overseas, and (b) sponsors deserve a plug. On that basis we have used Wonik Cup in our database, though we say Ch'eonweon for the "Korean Tengen" as that is not a name.

With place names it's trickier. For hotels and inns we use the same thinking as for tournament names, but for cities and provinces we tend to compromise and use McC-R but with sound changes. This corresponds to the practice until recently on Korean road signs etc, though the new official Korean romanisation has changed all that (now it's Busan for Pusan and so on) and there is even a law that all road signs need to be changed by a certain date soon. A problem there is that a large majority of westerners, both inside and outside Korea, resolutely refuse to change over.

There's no simple answer.

Steve: I don't see any reason to go against established practice on SL, so I'd like to stick with what the guys at GoGoD and Go World, etc. are doing.

I don't understand the distinction you make between the cup and the tournament, but I'd guess we could use aliases for that. As I understand it now, GoGoD uses Wonik Cup on the basis that that that is the English name of the sponsoring organisation. So I intend to create an alias Wonik Cup, and use that as far as possible, and list Weon-ik and Wangik as WikiOrphans.

John F. Typically the title of a tournament is owned by the go association. One way a sponsor can be given prominence is to attach a cup with the sponsor's name. If the sponsor drops out, and another comes along, you just rename the cup and not the event. This is especially common in China. E.g. the Cities League was at first called the Haomao Cup, then the Jiangling Cup, now something else.

In Korea it's a bit messier in some ways. Sponsors on the whole stay the course. So credit where credit's due. the tournament that was originally called Baduk Wang (or Paduk Wang or King of Baduk/Patuk) in English literature is now best referred to as the KBS Cup because they have been sponsoring now for 23 years (but also because it's useful to make the analogy with the NHK Cup and the CCTV in the context of the TV Asia Champsionship).

There are events where there is no real tournament name, only a sponsor's name (e.g. Fujitsu Cup, Samsung Cup). That's fine, though it gets messy when the sponsor changes its own name - the Techron Cup morphed into the LG Refined Oils Cup and then the GS Caltex Cup.

It's a bit of a fine art pinning a western name on a tournament, and you have to be prepared to change from an earlier choice sometimes. But one other principle we use at GoGoD may be usefully mentioned: because so many tournament names sound similar in English (e.g. King of the New Faces, New Stars, New Blood, etc) we very often just stick with the Oriental name, e.g. Shinjin-O and Shinei and Shunei in the cases just mentioned. It's not a perfect solution but it does have one big merit. It tells you at once which country is involved. King of the New Stars could refer (at least) to the Shinjin-O, Xinren Wang and Sinin Wang (all the same characters).

In this case cross-referencing Weon-ik and Wonik is fine, but banish Wang-ik for ever. The Won/weon is pronounced like the english word "won" (as in won game) by the way.

John F. We now know this will be the Korean 10-dan Tournament. I haven't decided yet what we will call it in GoGoD, but since we say Judan for the Japanese one, I suppose we have to say Siptan for this (with Shiptan as an alias).

Jared: The recent AGAE-J calls it the "Sibdang" Is this at all correct?

bugcat: GoBase also refers to it as the Sibdang.