Chinese wéiqí, Japanese go, and English go
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.
First 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.
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. It would be good for other Language Log readers to inform us how the name of the game is handled in other languages.
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