![]() Uniquely, the game’s central piece has maintained its original title throughout Europe. Mysteriously, Estonian calls the piece lipp (“flag”). Russian (and other Slavic languages) also variously use(d) koroleva (“queen”), korolevna (“princess”), tsaritsa (“emperor’s wife”), kral (“queen”), dama (“lady”), and baba (“old woman”). While the piece is called “lady” or “queen” in most European languages, Russian and other Slavic languages retain versions of ferz, the Persian term for “counselor.” Polish uses hetman, a high military rank from Eastern European history. The mantri could only move one square diagonally, whereas the modern queen combines the straight-line moves of the rook with the diagonal ones of the bishop. What is clear, however, is that the piece not only acquired a new, female identity but also greater powers. Why did the king’s counsel become his consort? Three (possibly complimentary) theories circulate: the religious cult of the Virgin Mary, the literary trope of courtly love, and the relative importance of queens in medieval politics. The term does have some pedigree: the Lewis chessmen, carved from walrus ivory in the 12th century, already have the bishops dressed in recognizably ecclesiastical garb. The miter-shaped appearance came after the name. A notable alternative to the official Bulgarian term ofitser (“officer”) is fritz, derived from the nickname for German troops during the Second World War - a relatively recent innovation, probably helped by the fact that it sounds similar to the official term.Īpart from English, only a few other languages call this piece the “bishop”: Icelandic, Faroese, Irish, and Portuguese. Officer and/or nobleman is a rather generic term. But in the past, it has also been called a durak (“fool”, probably a loan from the French) and an offizer. The Russians are among those who have maintained the original “elephant,” called slon in Russian. The wide range of this piece’s movements explains terms such as “runner” (e.g., Läufer in German), “hunter” (e.g., lovac in Serbian), “gunner” (e.g., strelec in Slovak), and “spear” ( oda in Estonian). Another whisper changed alphilus, which means nothing in Italian, into alfiere, which means “standard bearer” in Italian. In French, that became fil, fol, and finally fou, which means “fool” or “jester.” That term was the result of a chain of Chinese whispers, which was then faithfully translated into Romanian. That was Arabized as al-fil, which was Latinized as alphilus. It starts as another elephant, except that this piece was actually called “elephant” in Sanskrit ( hasti) and in Persian ( pil). No chess piece elicits a wider range of epithets across Europe than the bishop. With a good old-fashioned siege in mind, it is not such a big leap from castles and towers to “cannon,” which is what the piece is called throughout the Balkans.Īn eclectic range of epithets. The elephant eventually disappeared, while the (Persian) name stuck. That’s virtually identical to rocca, the old Italian term for “fortress”, which association in turn gave rise to alternate names for the piece: torre (“tower”) and castello (“castle”).Īnother theory is that Persian war chariots were so heavily armored that they resembled small, mobile fortifications - hence the link between rukh and castles.Ī third idea is that the people carrier on the back of elephants in India, called a howdah and used in war to attack opponents, was often represented as a fortified castle tower in chess pieces from 16 th– and 17 th-century Europe. One theory is that the Arabs transmitted the Persian term rukh almost unchanged to Europe, where it turned into old Italian roc or rocco. Yet in many languages across Europe, this piece is known as a tower or a castle. In the earliest versions of the game, this was a “chariot” - ratha in Sanskrit, rukh in Persian. (See Strange Maps # 844 for an itinerary of the game and an overview of its various names across the world.) It first emerged in India in the early 7 th century as chaturanga, finally reaching Iceland as skák around 1600 AD. Chaturanga to skákĬhess took a millennium to conquer the known world. What you may call a bishop, somebody else knows as an elephant. But scratch the surface and the standardized game reveals a multitude of linguistic particularities. In the Chinese example, Mandarin and Cantonese speakers can read and understand the same text, even though they use different words for the same concepts.Ĭhess too is perfectly intelligible by participants who share no other communication skills. ( Credit: Foto Olimpik / NurPhoto via Getty Images)Ī game of chess is like a Chinese newspaper: a set of symbols that can be understood by people who speak different languages. Russia’s Vladislav Artemiev and Alina Bivol ( background) during the FIDE Chess World Rapid & Blitz Championship 2021 in Warsaw on December 29.
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