Ai am a fan of go. Ai play it a lot online, and occasionally in meatspace too. Ai can’t say ai’m a particularly good player by any means, but it’s fun, and also fun to talk about.

When people who don’t know about the game hear me talk about it, though, they are rather likely to get confused, at least if ai’m speaking in English, which is what ai’m probably doing. That, of course, is because, rather than only referring to this game of ancient Chinese origin which is played on a 19×19 grid, the monosyllabic word “go” also happens to be one of the common words in the English language.

It did not need to be this way.

In the Japanese language, this game is either called 囲碁 (romaji: «igo») or just 碁 (romaji: «go»). The shorter form is apparently more common, but one has to wonder why, in English, we didn’t adopt the longer form if only to make the term more distinguishable. Then there’s the matter of there being at least two other East Asian languages whose names for this game are significantly different from anything that already exists in English, which cannot be said for either Japanese name. In Mandarin, the game is called 圍棋 (pinyin: «wéiqí»), and in Korean, it is called 바둑 (romaja: «baduk»). Ai haven’t been able to find the names for this game in any other East Asian language, unfortunately, but working with what we’ve got, it’s clear that we have two terms that would be less confusing than the term that is currently the standard: “weiqi” (dropping the pinyin diacritics) and “baduk”.

If ai was going to make an argument for one or the other, ai would have to say that we should use “baduk”, if only for the reason that it is going to be a lot easier for your average anglophone to pronounce correctly. The rules of pinyin are non-intuitive to anglos who haven’t learned them, so instead of pronouncing the word way-CHEE, as they should, you’d probably get a lot of people embarrassing themselves by saying wee-KAI or weh-KEE or whatever. This problem would be easily resolved by changing the orthography to something more intuitive, i.e. “waychee” instead of “weiqi”, buuuuut ai don’t like that, it looks weird.

Incidentally, it would seem that the reason that the Japanese-derived name came to predominate in English (and in other European languages) is due to greater contact between European and Japanese academics, politicians, rich people, etc. from the nineteenth century on. Japan, of course, has arguably been the most problematic among the trio of itself, Korea, and China, at least in terms of emulating (quite successfully, at least for a little bit) the model of the nineteenth-century European imperial power, and then (again quite successfully, for a little bit) the model of the post-World War II capitalist powerhouse. So to the extent that using a particular word can be, in itself, imperialist, using “go” rather “baduk” or “weiqi” may be that. Take these words as seriously as you care to.

Also neat: rather than speaking of “go players”, we could use the fancy word “badukists” to refer to people who play this game. Ai am all about it.