Go is the Japanese reading of his Chinese name. He was born Chinese, and his surname is 五, the number “5”, pronounced Wu in Chinese and Go in Japanese. Not the same “Go” as in igo (… but the same “go” in “gomaku”, the game of five-in-a-row)
His opponents who played him were sometimes mystified, though the reason often becomes clear many moves down the road. He was not afraid of starting complex fights, even ko fights, and the games often have huge swings in territory. He played in a way with great freedom. Opponents would play thinking they played a forcing move, only for Go Seigan to tenuki (play elsewhere on a board, often at strategically vital points). People have tried to replicate his style, but it is difficult to put into practice without Go Seigan’s reading skills.
> Also, his given name contains the character 源, which is read "gen" in Japanese, not "gan".
This may be way outside of your wheelhouse, but I have to ask -
The Mandarin reading of 源 is yuán. The phonetics are something like [ʲyɛn]. A similar raising of the written vowel occurs in the pinyin syllable yan (e.g. 言, 严, 眼), which is [jɛn]. In other pinyin syllables, an "a" represents /a/, which is something sort of intermediate between the English PALM and TRAP vowels.
It makes perfect theoretical sense that /a/ might be realized as [ɛ] when following a high vowel. But I've always wondered whether yuan and yan really do have a phonemic /a/ there or whether there might be an /ɛ/ phoneme. And it's interesting to me that the Japanese reading of 源, presumably taken from a much older Chinese, uses /e/ there instead of /a/. Can you provide any insight?
* Different Chinese variations (Cantonese, Min, etc.) have different readings. Initials, vowels, and finals all differ.
* When borrowed into Japanese, the Chinese initial was ŋ, which isn't used as an initial in Japanese, and was substituted.
I also wouldn't assume that sounds that are grouped together are supposed to sound the same. en/yin/wen/yun use the same final in bopomofo, but sound different.
this smells exceptionally offtopic but if there's no phonemic -ja- then there's no reason to distinguish it from -jɛ- in a phonemic analysis, is there?
although i believe mandarin can be analysed as a weird two vowel system if you take this approach too far though i don't have the paper handy
Within-syllable -jɛ- exists in yan and its "compounds" tian, mian, lian, etc; changing the final consonant to -ŋ gives you the yang / niang / liang / xiang series of syllables, which have -ja-. This would suggest that, if the vowels are to be unified into one phoneme, the realization of that phoneme is driven more by the following consonant than the preceding vowel/glide.
There's something weird going on where -ɛ- in a complex syllable can appear with more onsets than -a- can. We see e.g. tie, tian, die, dian, mie, mian, bian, pian (with -ɛ-) where we don't see tia, tiang, dia, diang, mia, miang, piang (which would use -a-). xia, jia, qia are all fine, and so is niang. My working hypothesis for that would be "it's a coincidence".
I believe without being able to cite anything that one reason for the spelling of yuan and similar codas with "a" is local variation in how the vowel is pronounced.
Local variation is indeed a hint since there are varieties that have more of an [ɑ] than an [ɛ] in <mian>, <lian> and so forth. Secondly, one can indeed analyze at least all the clearly compound finals (as opposed to the five simplex candidates, in Pinyin a, e, yi, yu, wu) as having either a high (as in, raised tongue) or a low (lowered tongue) nuclear vowel. Let's symbolize the former as ɵ and the latter as ᴀ, then Pinyin yin, yan, ying, yang can be analyzed as /iɵn/, /iᴀn/, /iɵŋ/, /iᴀŋ/. PY yong, BTW, comes out as a slightly surprising /üɵŋ/ (with /üᴀŋ/ missing), yue as /üɵ/ (with /üᴀ/ missing), yun and yuan as /üɵn/ and /üᴀn/. One hint that /üɵŋ/ for yong might be a good solution is the observation that Zhuyinfuhao (aka Bopomofo) writes this syllable as ㄩㄥ, which is analyzed (within this orthographic system) as ㄩㄜㆭ, so roughly PY üeng.
Further note - traditional Chinese phonology categorizes syllables by their onset and rime. mian is [mjɛn], notionally m- onset and -jɛn rime. yan is [jɛn], notionally zero onset and -jɛn rime. (And analogously for many syllable series involving a glide.)
One distinction that some Chinese speakers fail to make, though, is between the r- onset and what I would prefer to think of as the j- onset. Thus, for these speakers, rang / yang or rou / you are the same sound.
Pinyin ran uses the standard /a/ vowel, but yan does not. I don't know whether, for speakers who don't distinguish r- from y-, a distinction remains in the vowel of ran/yan syllables.
