Contemporary Go Terms
- The book Contemporary Go Terms at e.g.
Contemporary Go Terms (see cover) by Nam Chihyung lists English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Go terms on 335 pages and has registers for all 4 languages.
Unfortunately for many no proper pinyin present (ˉ , ́ , ˇ , ̀ are missing). The author does not tell whether he uses jiantizi (used in PRC), fantizi or both (concerning Chinese). It is fantizi (used in Taiwan, Hongkong, Singapure a.o.) in baizhao (losing move)
The book has a nice small layout: 19cm x 14 cm.
It has a very sturdy hardcover (for many years of work).
Obviously missing are tables with hiragana, katakana + Hangul-alphabet table (romanization of Korean language has changed many times and does not seem to be consistent).
They would be very useful for all those word entries which are not in the book, thereby enabling the reader/learner better.
I am sure that a 2nd edition would have these on two more pages.
This is a very useful book for all whith the ambit to use Go literature in the other languages.
June 9-10, 2005: Just exploring the book I encounter the following nice features (for learning and spreading Go):
- the biggest part (254 pages) is used for the explanations of the moves and concepts.
- these explanations are in English
- therefore many to-the-point diagrams are used.
- good explanations
- several (many) of the English term entries seem (say, taken the Almanac as reference) to be explained for the first (true?) time in English:
(New) English terms:
- Bang-naegi
- Dipping knight's move (going to the 2nd line, e.g. taking an opponent's base away; "foot sweep"
- Distribution (of stones)
- Rotation Ko (the know terms "Repeating position" and "Molasses ko" are missing as references/genus/synonyms)
- Rotten axe (-> history of Go)
- Style of Play
etc.
Missing English terms
- failure (there is an entry "losing move", obviously only a subspecies)
- 输 shū to lose
- wrong
- correct
- move
This only means that it is not a dictionary for always instant use, rather you have to read this book once cover-to-cover.
Mistakes/Oddities
In all occasions (half-point, half-eye etc. in CN, JP, KR) where the edtiors 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).
Similar these two books show this particuliar 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)
Conclusion: It is a pity that not those characters are employed which are most widely used nowadays (jiantizi). This is a serious drawback.
The complicated fantizi used in the book are sometimes not easy to decipher and recognize, because their print is small and thin and fantizi use more strokes than jiantizi.
The book wants to address the Asian reader too.
For me the question arises why a potential, guessed 1.3 billion customer market is left out. The fewer potential customers from Taiwan, Singapure and Hongkong who learned and use fantizi, also easily can read the simpler jiantizi. It is true that many Mainland Chinese may be used to read fantizi as well, despite that they only learned jiantizi at school.
This scenario does not hold for the non-Asians (say Westeners).
Some of us perhaps learned only some jiantizi and had to consult every time a comparative table in order to decipher a text in fantizi. Having in mind that also the market of publications is way bigger in Mainland China (jiantizi), I conclude that the editors should have chosen to give both: fantizi and jiantizi (despite any possible, hard-to-understand preference by the editors).
Not to forget the diacritic signs on the pinyin:
- it also helps the Chinese speaker of another dialect than putonghua ("Mandarin"), let alone the "Westeners"
Most of the people just want to use this book as a reference and will not investigate as I do.
For most of the readers this book is not (as much) the help they wished to have if
i) fantizi differs much from jiantizi and
ii) they are wishing to read a text in jiantizi (e.g. from Mainland China).
Normal Chinese text is already a puzzle if you did not study Chinese, hence why complicating the process?
Conclusion: The western reader will find here many, many entries which are useful for understanding Asian texts. Thereby reading Magazines is much tougher than even a Fuseki book, because they might talk about everything (e.g. their last vacation/trip or hobbies) when commenting on a game, whereas Fuseki teaching might be still purely technical.
Mutatis mutandis above holds for the Asian reader.
I cannot imagine many Asian readers wanting to subscribe to Western Go literature instead of the more available and profounder Asian literature. Yet there might be - literally - many, who might like to communicate in English (as the "lingua franca" to quote the author) even among the Asians (CN, KR, JP).
80 pages are used for the 4 cross-listings.
This will be my most important book for the coming time (very useful for the many, now available, Korean books).