From: Eiki Ito HAL COM> Date: 19 mar 2001 Subject: Re: About the name of the pieces Hi All, Martin Danerud wrote: >However, the one and only question which is important regarding shogi >in the west is the popularisation of shogi. ^^^^ I suppose this is meant to be "anywhere outside Japan":) Arnoud Kleynjan wrote: >I do not see why both my opponent and myself should now be bothered with >japanese names, words that neither of us use in day-to-day life. To me, it >makes *no* sense to propose that for *international* Shogi japanese names >will be used. > : >Given that English is probably the de-facto language for international >communications in "the west", I think Shogi needs an "western" standard >vocabulary that is based on english. That should include the names of the >pieces (in english!), but also things like notation (use boards with arabic >numerals for both rows and columns), standard abbreviations for >correspondence shogi (keeping in mind the limitations of today's PCs and >their inability to (easily) produce kanji characters), names of openings, >etc. > : >If, ages ago, chess players had insisted on new players learning a >reasonable number of Italian words (or Persian, or Indian, or...), chess >would not have become so popular throughout the world. I completely agree with these statements. Popularisation (or "marketing") of shogi is the agenda #1. Any factor that's specific to Japanese culture should be excluded from Shogi, if it is to be popular worldwide. (Whether it should be may be debatable, but I personally would like to see that happen.) I'm not against using local languages at all. In fact, we Japanese can continue using our "local" notations using Kanji. Importance of establishing standard English notations is one thing that most people on this list seem to agree. The other, more arguable matter is the use of Chess terminology. In my opinion it's a good thing in general. Anything that helps understand shogi to new audience, we should use it. In the elementary school that my 6-year old daughter goes to, chess is taught in class. (We live in Northern California.) From this I guess that chess terminology is understandable even to lay people who are not "real" chess players. That said, there's one point which seems common on this list but I don't think it should be. It's the naming of squares: '1C' should be '13'. The main reason is that it's the way the Japanese use. We'll need to translate Japanese literature (game scores etc) into English. When we do that, translating "1<3inJapanese>" into "13" is straightforward, but into "1C" is not. Well, C=3 or D=4 is actually fine, but I always have trouble understanding whether "6h" is 67 or 68. I guess this use of alphabets instead of numbers came from chess, but this is not really helping even chess people since the direction is the opposite. I don't see any merits using alphabets here. Shogi Renmei publishes a magazine "Shogi Sekai (shogi world)", and there is one English page titled "Shogi Brief Lesson". In a sense, this is the only "official" English shogi info periodically coming from Renmei. This article uses number notation ("68"), not alphabets ("6h"). It uses English piece names (pawn/rook/...). So I would suggest we all follow this notation, to promote standarization of the language. thanks, eiki