From: SalvaAC AOL COM Date: 16 mar 2001 Subject: Re: About the name of the pieces --part1_a4.116b7c1c.27e3fbcb_boundary Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Which sounds like this is a common sense kind of thing. If I'm playing a game against another English speaking person, I will use English terminology, particularly if they are a relative beginner. However, I have enough knowledge of the Japanese terminology that if I am playing against a Japanese person, I can get by in a very basic way in Japanese... I cannot follow explanations of variations unless it's a simple recitation of a gamescore, but other than that I'm ok. Turned out to be helpful when I was the third in a blindfold game a couple years ago between a visiting pro and an American. But that knowledge didn't really come about until there was a need to use it. When I only had a few poor American opponents, English was fine. But it seems that as we grow as an international community, we should come up with an agreed-upon language for the basics, and Japanese just seems to be the best choice, from some sort of intuitive feel I've got. The difficulty there is would that suggest all shogi players learn a functional conversational Japanese, for international events? Sal > Of course, for someone with knowledge of English, but no Japanese, the > English names will be easier to remember than the Japanese, but in the case > of ca. 10 such names this hardly matters. (It might be a very good point in > the case of the bigger Shogi variants, though.) Nonetheless, piece names in > the language of the players appear: In Germany, we call a Hisha "Turm" and a > --part1_a4.116b7c1c.27e3fbcb_boundary Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Which sounds like this is a common sense kind of thing. If I'm playing a game
against another English speaking person, I will use English terminology,
particularly if they are a relative beginner. However, I have enough
knowledge of the Japanese terminology that if I am playing against a Japanese
person, I can get by in a very basic way in Japanese... I cannot follow
explanations of variations unless it's a simple recitation of a gamescore,
but other than that I'm ok.  Turned out to be helpful when I was the third in
a blindfold game a couple years ago between a visiting pro and an American.  
But that knowledge didn't really come about until there was a need to use it.
When I only had a few poor American opponents, English was fine. But it seems
that as we grow as an international community, we should come up with an
agreed-upon language for the basics, and Japanese just seems to be the best
choice, from some sort of intuitive feel I've got.

The difficulty there is would that suggest all shogi players learn a
functional conversational Japanese, for international events?

Sal

Of course, for someone with knowledge of English, but no Japanese, the
English names will be easier to remember than the Japanese, but in the case
of ca. 10 such names this hardly matters. (It might be a very good point in
the case of the bigger Shogi variants, though.) Nonetheless, piece names in
the language of the players appear: In Germany, we call a Hisha "Turm" and a
Keima "Springer", it would be strange to use the English names here


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