Pijngrens

DieterVerhofstadt copied this discussion from UserCreatedGoSlang to make it a separate page.

AndreEngels: The pain limit (which is a word in Dutch of which I do not know the usual English translation): The swallowest [sic] invasion such that the opponent is not happy with just enclosing his territory below it

BillSpight: Andre had a typo. I was going to change it to "shallowest", but I like the image of a swallow lightly dipping down into the opponent's moyo. :-)
I also like the term, "pain limit". It's high time we started developing our own go vocabulary. :-) Andre, what is the Dutch word? There's no reason to stick to English.

The Dutch word is pijngrens. In Dutch, composite words are written continuously (so it's not "pijn grens"), just like in German. I have to say that foetsiekawari is a marvelous word which had not crossed the Moerdijk (historical Flemish-Dutch border) yet.

And the [sic] above tells me that André's "typo" was intentional. But hey, why do I come to aid while all we Belgians get is being sandwiched between our French and Dutch neighbours' scoldings ? #:-7 Let's see if I can dip out some true stories like Morten did.

--DieterVerhofstadt

BillSpight: Thanks for the Dutch, Dieter. :-) Is it pronounced like PI:N' GRENS? Or PAIN' GRENS?
I added the [sic]. I would have used square brackets...

KarlKnechtel: I fixed all the [sic]'s by using PhpWiki's escape functionality - you can view the page source in the editor to see how it's done :) This way everything looks right, and there's no [sic] entry on UndefinedPages. :)

Stefan: The pronunciation of the 'ij' is close to the middle 'e' in "where" or "there". That's about the closest sound I can think of in English. If I can persuade the microphone on my home PC into working again, I'll e-mail you a wav-file with a nice "pijngrens" in there.

(As Dieter said, why are we Belgians doing all this for you ungrateful rest-of-the-world??? :-)

Dieter: I avoided that question because the Dutch (like André) and the Flemish (like Stefan and myself) pronounce the diphthongs differently. In Flemish it does sound like in where but in "proper" Dutch it comes closer to pain. Actually the "ei" in Wei Qi gets very close.

But then you still haven't crossed the "pijngrens" in trying to pronounce that word. The "g" sound which the Dutch pronounce as a rough guttural and the Flemish as a soft guttural - a sound I haven't met in any other language - is really a throatbreaker for foreigners

Stefan: Bill, I've produced a reasonable "pijngrens.wav", in case you're still interested. I don't have your email address, though.

Andre Engels: Some remarks: 1. 'Pijngrens' must have come below the Moerdijk, although perhaps not across the current Dutch-Belgian border. It originated in a game discussion on the Rotterdam tournament in (I think 1999). I later came across it when the same game was discussed in the Dutch Go magazine. One of the players of the game was from Tilburg, and I myself live in Eindhoven, so it did get across Moerdijk.
2. The typo was not intentional. The '[sic]' is Bill's, not mine.
3. The 'ij' is indeed not a sound in English, but I think that the vowel in 'why' comes the closest, which makes 'pijn' sound like 'pine'. For those who speak German - it's the same as the 'ei' in German (like "Rhein"). But perhaps Flemish pronunciation differs from Dutch...
4. My dictionary gives "pain threshold" as the English translation of "pijngrens".