DaveSigaty: Evolution of this page and meaning of term (2010-01-03 16:54) [#6886]

Thanks to John F for clarifying this usage. I was the original author and wondered whether I had missed the point when I saw how this page had evolved over time. Here is the original text (c. 2001):

The literal meaning is selfish (katte) reading (yomi) and the meaning in Go is to make a mistake in reading by assuming that your opponent will make responses that lead to the result you want (in other words responses that are not actually the best). The result is as much 'superficial' reading as 'selfish'. Who among us does not suffer from this problem? :-)

Strictly speaking it is not a pure Go term since it has a broader usage something like 'interpreting things from a selfish point of view'.

While this is what it had evolved into in the mean time (c. 2009):

Katteyomi (勝手読み) is a Japanese go term referring to subconsciously ignoring good sequences for your opponent during reading, making assumptions that lead to things working out better for yourself. Sometimes known as "wishful reading", it has also been translated as "self-indulgent reading."... Katte literally means winning moves(s), from Katsu: to win and Te: move (literally: hand). Yomi is reading. It means to only reading the winning moves instead of considering all possibilities.

This points to one of the problems with wiki's in general, without strict checking the meanings can shift over time and (with the best intentions) inaccuracies can be introduced. With ~20,000 pages in SL, I offer no panacea for solving this issue. I simply mention the problem with reference to this page.

Katteyomi does not appear as a Go term in the Go glossaries that I have access to. However, a search on Google gave me the following information that seems to support various meanings for Katteyomi. Searches (January 2009) for Japanese pages based on alternative spellings of the term:

• 勝手読み (current spelling in the CJK box) - approx. 21,600 pages. These seem to contain a lot of game pages (Go and Shogi, etc.) but also include such things as the "ディック・フランシス (Dick Francis) 勝手読み" reading list on Amazon.co.jp (for self-indulgent readers of Dick Francis mysteries? :-)
• 勝手ヨミ (the spelling in the tsumego book that prompted me to create the page in the first place, Ishida's 語段突破の詰碁100) - 457 pages. These seem to be almost all Go and shogi game pages.
• 勝って読み (the original CJK box spelling) - about 828,000 pages. These contain some game pages but many that are more general.

So does Katteyomi have a more specialized meaning specific to games? Are these usages that are too specialized to make it into Japanese dictionaries? Maybe! Certainly I am too ignorant to say :-)