Not surprisingly we don't find any elephants in the European chess sets. The earliest known chesspieces (chatrang) were found at Afrasaib, near Samarkand in Uzbekistan. The piece has a cross on top of it and was found in an old Byzantine or Roman palace. 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. If this is really a chess piece, then it is the oldest chess piece found anywhere in the world. 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 a standard chess game, each player begins the game with the following 16 pieces: King (1) Queen (1) Bishops (2) Knights (2) Rooks (2) Pawns (8) The chess pieces all have their corresponding notations: The King is represented by the capital letter K, The Queen is given as Q, Knights as N, Bishops as B, Rooks as R. In French, the bishop is neither a bishop or a runner but a "fou" (fool/jester). This makes the queen one of the most lethal pieces in the set. The queen can move any number of spaces in any direction till it reaches the end of the board or till it kills a piece of the opponent’s army. Unlike the king, it does not have a cross on the top. Even the Queen is known as a "lady" (and not Königin/drottning, as one might expect). Queen (1 pieces) The Queen is the second-most tallest piece in the whole set. Pawn and Bauer/bonde have some overlap but are still distinct conceptual entities. Learn the names and shapes of 32 chess pieces, from the king to the pawn, with pictures and examples. So the knight was not a horseman but a "jumper", and the bishop was not a man of the cloth but a "runner". 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. It's interesting how the various pieces have been named and conceptualized in different languages. 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" It is played on a square chessboard with 64 squares laid out in an eight-by-eight grid. Pawn: German = Bauer "farmer, peasant" Swedish = bonde "farmer, peasant" Chess is a game of abstract strategy with no concealed information. 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:
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