Not surprisingly we don't find any elephants in the European chess sets. Rook then really points to the Oriental origins of chess, while medieval northern Europeans put their own interpretations on the other pieces, effectively naturalizing them. In English, we don't speak of a "tower" as Germans and Scandinavians do (although the old-fashioned term "castle" persists among the older generations), but of a "rook" which has no etymological value in English as it is originally a loanword from Persian (meaning "chariot"), via Arabic and French. In French, the bishop is neither a bishop or a runner but a "fou" (fool/jester). Even the Queen is known as a "lady" (and not Königin/drottning, as one might expect). Pawn and Bauer/bonde have some overlap but are still distinct conceptual entities. So the knight was not a horseman but a "jumper", and the bishop was not a man of the cloth but a "runner". This led to the current French name for the piece, which is fou, meaning jester or fool. The French also played on the similarity in sound between fil and the French word fol, which is related to the English word fool. Germans (and slightly later presumably Scandinavian speakers, probably mediated via German) must when the game arrived on their shores have seen the pieces of the newly introduced game and associated them with different things than did speakers of English. The French began calling it delfino, which suggested 'dauphin,' the French crown prince. It's interesting how the various pieces have been named and conceptualized in different languages. In this section, we will provide a basic overview of the six types of chess pieces: The King, The Queen, The Rook, The Bishop, The Knight, and The Pawn. Rook: German = Turm "tower" Swedish = torn "tower"Īs you can see, Scandinavian (here represented by Swedish) tends to follow the German model, rather than the English-language one. Queen: German = Dame "lady" Swedish = dam "lady" Pawn: German = Bauer "farmer, peasant" Swedish = bonde "farmer, peasant" Knight: German = Springer "jumper" Swedish = springare "jumper"īishop: German = Läufer "runner" Swedish = löpare "runner" I can only speak for German and Scandinavian, but, in contrast to English, the names of the following pieces are: Freux refers to the bird (un corbeau), which has nothing to do with the origins of the English chesspiece name Rook, which.
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