Other languages using variants of that script, such as persian, kurdish, urdu, etc., have a letter to represent /g/, so they transliterate in a pretty straightforward way. How that'd be pronounced varies across the arabic speaking world, but it's most commonly be with initial consonant /ɣ/. standard arabic lacks /g/ – and so the arabic name for game substitutes the letter qhayn, hence غو Skimming through the languages bar on the wikipedia article for the game, the heading for the articles about the game in pretty much all the languages other than east asian languages seem to be basically "go" – as rendered per the appropriate characters and spelling conventions of the various languages.Īn interesting variant is the arabic version. Filed by Victor Mair under Language and entertainment, TranslationĪs an aside, the game of gomoku, which is frequently played on a go ban (= "Go board") does not derive its name from that of Go at all - it is simply the Japanese for "five pieces" (or "five stones", as they are more usually called, but moku translates as "piece" rather than as "stone").You will notice that, until the last word of this post, I did not mention a certain competing term: chess. No matter what you call it, "encirclement board game" is an absorbing, mind-bending diversion (or preoccupation) for millions of people around the world. Less plausible etymologies include a derivation of Badukdok, referring to the playing pieces of the game, or a derivation from Chinese páizi ( 排子), meaning 'to arrange pieces'.Ī sidebar of this Wikipedia article on Go lists the names for the game in Mandarin, Suzhounese, Cantonese, Hokkien, Middle Sinitic, Old Sinitic, Tibetan, Vietnamese, and Korean. The Korean word baduk derives from the Middle Korean word Badok, the origin of which is controversial the more plausible etymologies include the suffix dok added to Ba to mean 'flat and wide board', or the joining of Bat, meaning 'field', and Dok, meaning 'stone'. In events sponsored by the Ing Chang-ki Foundation, it is spelled goe. In English, the name Go when used for the game is often capitalized to differentiate it from the common word go. The word Go is a short form of the Japanese word igo ( 囲碁 いご), which derives from earlier wigo ( ゐご), in turn from Middle Chinese ɦʉi gi ( 圍棋, Mandarin: wéiqí, lit. 'encirclement board game' or 'board game of surrounding'). It would be good for other Language Log readers to inform us how the name of the game is handled in other languages. So that we don't get sucked more deeply into a quagmire of nomenclatural confusion, I will put some basic linguistic facts about these names here. Some funny things happen when one tries to straighten out the relationships among these three names for one of the world's most challenging board games.įirst of all, if I put wéiqí 圍棋 / 围棋, the Chinese name of the game, into Google Translate (GT) and ask it to translate that into Japanese, out comes Iku 行く ("to go"), but if I ask GT to translate wéiqí 圍棋 directly into English, out comes "go", the English name of the game.
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