Korean Go proverbs

   

Korean Go proverbs

  • 'dae-ma-bul-sa' means literally “large horses do not lose.”'

John F. Not really - big groups never die.

tderz Thank you, JohnF. Of course, that is meant. 'Big dragons never die' has nothing to do with animals either. I just copied the Korean/English quote from a PDF and gave the source on the other page of Senseis.


MrTenuki: Since the pronunciation of the four characters sound similar to that of the Chinese language (which I do understand), I typed in my best guesses of the Hanja (Chinese characters used in the Korean language)--大馬不輸--into Google Translate and clicked on the "Read Phonetically" button. To my surprise, the pronunciation was actually "Daemabusu." However, changing the text to 大馬不死 (which would be "large horses do not die" if I interpret the characters in Chinese) does result in the "Daemabusa" rendering. To be safe, I also consulted an online Hanja dictionary, and the pronunciations I got for the corresponding Hangul equivalents of 輸 and 死 were also "su" and "sa," respectively.

So, part of me wonders if we have a case of mistranslation in the quoted text. Could anyone who understands Korean please verify the accuracy of the literal translation? (Again, the literal translation doesn't really matter here since the phrase is meant to be metaphorical. But it doesn't hurt to ensure that SL has correct information on linguistic notes.)


This is a copy of the living page "Korean Go proverbs" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2012 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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