What's in a name?

A guide to the often confusing result of cultural richness in the classic games - and a useful weapon for using an Internet search engine in search of information on the game.

Go is the usual word among western players for the game that Japanese normally call go, the Koreans call baduk, and the Chinese call weiqi. 

The first recorded name, in the Analects of Confucius, was yi. This is still used but only in literary contexts. The name weiqi (also written wei-ch'i , wei ch'i, wei chi, etc.) came into use in late Han or Wei times, around 1800 years ago. 

The Japanese used the characters for weiqi but pronounced them igo, abbreviated to go. In some contexts they also use ki as in Nihon Ki-in. 

The Koreans have devised their own word, though it is spelt various ways in western script: baduk, badug, patuk, paduk. 

In recent times, the Taiwanese businessman Ing Chang-ki created his own name, Goe, to distinguish his version of the rules from everyone else's. (The different rule sets have little impact on the game and normally only interest mathematicians.) 

Go has also long been known by two whimsical names (Chinese/Japanese): Zuoyin/Zain (Sitting in the Shadows) and Shoutan/Shudan (Handtalk). They were coined by two Chinese in the 4th century at a time of a highly intellectual fashion called Pure Conversation. 

Wang Zhonglang, a senior official in the court of the Eastern Jin Emperor, was a Buddhist who disliked the ostentation of Daoism. He coined the sober term Zuoyin. 

The more showy Shoutan was coined by a Daoist priest who eccentrically kept horses and cranes. He was called Zhi Daolin. 

The terms reached Japan very quickly and were widely used. There is a reference to Handtalk as early as 875 in a court diary. 

The diarist tells us he was given 10 kan of new money, sufficient for a stake at shudan. Even to this day, the leading go computer program by Professor Chen Zhixing of Zhongshan in China is known as Handtalk.


PERSONAL NAMES

Oriental names on this go site are all given in Oriental order: surname then personal name. In general we use the language of the country where a player is permanently resident.

Japanese surnames tend to look longer than Chinese or Korean, so are usually easy to spot (e.g. Kobayashi Koichi). There are some which are Japanese renderings of names from the other countries and these look short. E.g. O Rissei is Chinese Wang Licheng and Ryu Shikun is Korean Yu Si-hun.

Chinese names are in pinyin, and we follow the official style of writing the two-character names as one word (e.g. Liu Xiaoguang, not Liu Xiao Guang). Taiwanese players sometimes use the Wade-Giles romanisation, but we do not.

Korean names have yet to be standardised. The Korean government has promulgated two official systems, but most Koreans ignore both. Few Koreans adopt any kind of consistency. The result is that the same name can be written in a variety of ways (Kim and Gim; Yi, I, Lee, Li, Lie, Leigh, Ri, Rhi, Rhie, Rhee; Cheong, Chung, Djong, Jeong, Jung, Tschong, Zong; Yu, Lew, Liu, Lyu, Ryu, Yoo, You are just four examples common in go).

The solution adopted here is to use one of the official systems, McCune-Reischauer transcription, which is also used by scholars in the west. It has the merit that it is possible to transcribe back into hangul (Korean script), and the recommended use of the hyphen in personal names gives us a quick way to distinguish Korean names from Chinese.

However, the limitations of ascii text mean that we cannot reproduce the circumflex sometimes required over letters o and u. The standard way round this is to use a prefixed e, which is why the name of the capital is usually written Seoul.

Further small modification have been added for Korean tournament names and some company names. Where companies have a romanised name widely known in the west, this has been retained (e.g. Samsung for Sam-seong and Daewoo for Tae-u). 

Since some of these names occur in tournament titles, for consistency all tournament names are written without hyphens and the necessary internal sound changes made (though McCune-Reischauer is still used).

In the case of historical names, it is normal for Japanese players to be referred to be their second names. Most belonged to hereditary schools and adopted the school's name as a surname, which means distinguishing between them could be a problem. We normally write Shusai for Honinbo XXI or Honinbo Shusai.

Very many historical personages in the Orient can be found with a variety of names. Surnames often changed in Japan because of adoption, and personal names in all countries were often replaced by allusive style names or studio names. We will try to be consistent and give cross references.

Full details of all go names, and biographies, can be found in "Dictionary of Go Names" by John Fairbairn (London 1998). It is currently out of print but several go associations have library copies.