There is some in-country variation that's ignored in this article. In Poland, names of pieces will vary based on family you come from (as this game is usually learnt at kindergarten age from your parents/grandparents). For example, in my family we refer to the knight as "koń" (horse) rather than "skoczek" (jumper), and instead of using the more Polish-sounding "goniec" for the bishop we use "laufer" borrowed from German. Also, even though the official (as in: approved by some chess institutions in the country) name for the queen is "hetman", I'd say 90%+ Poles say "królowa" (literally queen).
That is similar in Hungary, for example the pawn is either a walker or a peasant, and the queen is either a visir or a queen (but it's a ruling queen, királynő, rather than queen consort, királyné, which I find nice :) )
Do you have any source for the 90% figure? Some casual players do indeed use the alternative names, but pretty much everyone I know uses „hetman” for the queen. (I’ve even heard the colloquial abbreviation „heć”.) Literature uses the official names exclusively.
No. I've just made it up. But I've never heard it in my life playing with other people; only when watching Polish grandmasters and other people involved in chess in an official capacity.
The problem is that we want names with distinct first letter for the simple chess notation and "horse" and "queen" conflict with "king" and each other.
The story I heard about the Queen was that she started off being able to move a single square in each direction[1], but the upgrade to let her move the full diagonals, ranks and files was done as a tribute to Queen Isabella of Spain.
I sure hope the knight is not called "calvary" in that many countries as suggested by the legend in the second map. Unless there is a connection between the knight's movements and crucifixion?
Strange he mentions Chinese but not Chinese Chess (Elephant Chess).
In Chinese Chess, more or less all the original names have been retained, whereas they have changed radically in Western chess as discussed.
Chinese chess pieces (and their rough positional but not power equivalents in western chess) are: the General (king), the Advisor (queen), the Elephant (bishop), the Horse (knight), the Chariot (rook), the Soldier (pawn), and famously the Cannon.
> While it may seem logical that the king has a queen by his side, that’s not how things started out. In the Indian original, this piece was the king’s “counselor” (mantri in Sanskrit). The Arabs used wazir (“vizier,” i.e., the ruler’s minister/secretary), which was Latinized to farzia, which became the French vierge (“virgin”).
Just the other day I was wondering what a stupid name for the Queen's piece. Not at all logical. It's battlefield and not wedding/ceremony for queen to be by-his-side. Vazir is popular piece name in India as well.
In Hindi, Persian and Arabic variations of the game, the bishop piece was referred to as a "camel". I don't know where the author got this concept of "second elephant".
"It was used in standard chess before being replaced by the bishop in the 15th and 16th centuries. [...] The alfil is a very old piece, appearing in some very early chess variants, such as Tamerlane chess and shatranj. It was originally called an elephant, hastīn or gāja in Sanskrit. [...] When chess spread to China, the piece became the elephant in xiangqi. [...] When chess came to Persia from India, the Sanskrit name was translated to pil, and when chess came to the Muslims from Persia, the move had not changed, and then the name changed into Arabic to fil, the already existing cognate to pil which comes from the Akkadian language and ultimately from the Egyptian language. The name thus became fil and then alfil (prefixing the Arabic definite article, al)."
"The bishop's predecessor in medieval chess, shatranj (originally chaturanga), was the alfil, meaning "elephant", which could leap two squares along any diagonal, and could jump over an intervening piece."
> being replaced by the bishop in the 15th and 16th centuries.
> The bishop is a modern European invention.
Actually the Atlas Obscura article shows that only a small portion of Europe adopted bishop. I often consider the English version of Wikipedia as the "universal" one, but this remembers me that it's likely to be biased, instead.
The pieces are mainly defined by their movement - not by their name or shape.
"[A piece that jumps two squares diagonally, leaping over any intermediate piece] was used in standard chess before being replaced by [a piece that moves along diagonals without jumping over intervening pieces] in the 15th and 16th centuries."
Of course whether the name changed or not is relevant for the structure of the wikipedia entries and impacts the degree of detail about the historical evolution.
By the way the English entry for "bishop" also mentions that the elephant-linked naming remains in some languages (and has a table of names/translations in 72 languages with 17 elephants in it):
"Derivatives of alfil survive in the languages of the two countries where chess was first introduced within Western Europe—Italian (alfiere) and Spanish (alfil) [...] In some Slavic languages (e.g. Czech/Slovak) the bishop is called [...] while in others it is still known as "elephant" (e.g. Russian slon)."
> 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.
Written mandarin is different from written Cantonese and the differences are more than simplified vs traditional characters
Written Cantonese exists, but most Cantonese-speakers write in standard written Chinese (which is what you’re calling “written Mandarin” here), and pronounce the characters in Cantonese, regardless of whether they can speak Mandarin.
100% correct. Cantonese speakers write in Chinese just as Mandarin speakers do (though they pronounce the characters differently). Written Cantonese, as it were, is cobbled together from certain Chinese characters and, of all things, a few English letters: perhaps mostly used nowadays to portray Cantonese dialogue in comic books.
Yeah, not a good example. Written vernacular mandarin started in the Ming dynasty and more or less was forcefully promoted in the Qing and later Republic of China as _the_ way to write Chinese, meaning other dialects lost out on developing a common written vernacular form. In this example most Cantonese speakers learned mandarin grammar and vocabulary, at least to read and write it.
But did written Chinese not exist before then? Before, the literate people in East Asia used Classical Chinese, which was essentially a similar forced standardization from the dominant vernacular 2000 years ago, very similar to Europe's use of Latin. Issac Newton could read and write Latin because he learned it, not because English naturally gets written as Latin!
> Lady -> Reina/Dama * (You could use either, but the article lists them separately and doesn't recognize Queen, which is the more common of the two)
I think the reason is that the article follows the FIDE rules rather than colloquial use.
I was about the comment something similar about Dutch, where the word for Queen (“Koningin”) is also more common than the official FIDE-term Lady (“Dame”). I suspect the reason for this choice is that the FIDE also establishes an official chess notation where each piece has a single letter abbreviation. In Dutch this presents the problem that “Koning” (King) is a prefix of “Koningin” (Queen), so it makes sense to abbreviate king with K, but it's not clear what letter to assign to the Queen. It makes sense then to switch to “Dame” and use the letter D for this piece.
I think the same thing applies to Romance languages where the words for King and Queen derive from the Latin words Rex and Regina (Roi and Reine in French, Rey and Reina in Spanish, etc.), all of which start with the letter 'R'. Then switching to Lady (dame/dama) for the Queen makes sense just to create a unique letter.
So, contrary to the "reasonably educated people play chess" trope, I do not play chess and was quite ignorant of it. During a programming job interview, I was presented with what is apparently a sample problem of moving around a piece. I had to ask how the piece "moved" but didn't get the name.
Although the problem was easy, I still remember the interviewer flinching slightly each time I called it "the horsey piece."
In Norwegian the knight is called "springer", as mentioned in the article, but many call it "hest" ("horse") too. They are both valid names.
The translation of "springer" is a bit imprecise. Instead of simply "jumper", it describes a "human or animal that can jump". A horse fits that description well
"Springer" is actually sometimes used to describe a knight's horse instead of the most common word. So "springer" has connections to both horse and knight.
Can you cite some example articles? It's a for-profit Series-B startup [0] in an ever-worsening digital publishing market [1] and article sourcing is paid writers not peer-reviewed crowdsourced, so I expect parts might be worse than Wikipedia, and certainly have very selective coverage. But at first glance I didn't see any glaring errors. Also I expect they won't have an openly exposed peer-review editing process, so if an article turns out to be bad they might delete or hide it (but I can't find any such).
> According to the sacred book of creation myths, the Popol Vuh, primates were a life form that had arisen during one of the many earlier experimental periods of creation by the gods.
> According to the myth, the gods were ultimately disappointed with the result, which they found to be too frivolous and rebellious and thus strove to perfect and shape the form of some of the monkeys.
Maybe "flat out wrong" was too harsh. But I don't think this is exactly right. The earlier attempt were men made out of wood, who almost all drowned in a great flood. The few survivors turned into monkeys. The second attempt at man was made out of maize, and those survived to become humans.
But I don't think there's anything about the gods being displeased because the first creation were monkeys. Monkeys from what I understand were more of a byproduct.
I'd say that was one minor error in one article (10 paragraphs, 24 sentences) of their ~25K articles.
It's not even that that single article is "flat out wrong": only that paragraph (and maybe the heading). Can you cite any other article as being wrong?
AO looks more reliable than Wikipedia (obviously much lower coverage).
Yeah maybe I was too harsh. But I only knew that because I'm writing a book that features Mesoamerica and my factchecker told me it was wrong. Which made me think there may be other things that are wrong that I don't have access to an expert on.
A small nitpick: the rook from the original game was a mythical bird of prey called Rukh/Roc. The chess piece was a bird. It became a tower later. So, the theory is birds were often used as figureheads on boats, that's why it is called a boat in Turkey/Russia.
Also the other, outdated name (but still in use) for a rook in Russian is "Тура"/Tura, which is of course a (siege) tower.
> the rook from the original game was a mythical bird of prey called Rukh/Roc. The chess piece was a bird.
That doesn't seem to be the mainstream explanation: the original piece in the game would be a chariot -thought the connection with the name rukh is not clear- and the alternative bird representation would have been an Arab innovation.
I suspect every time the article says "why's that so? nobody knows!", somebody actually knows and they would have found out if they had researched a little...
As usual, uBlock Origin with Firefox solves these issues. Although even with uBlock turned off Firefox's built-in tracking protection kills all ads except or one (for a book published by the website).
I'm guessing the only people on Hacker News who still see ads are the people in the ad industry and iOS users that hate Safari and are prevented from getting proper ad blocking in other browsers.
I don't have any ad-blocker installed and only see 2 ads at the very beginning of the article. Not ideal but far from constantly battering. Using Chrome on Android.
Author doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The knight is a knight because its L-shaped movement represents a flanking maneuver, which cavalry is good at.
Most of them seemed pretty reasonable, but yeah the knight bit was a bit off odd.
> From the very beginning of chaturanga, this piece—originally called asva, Sanskrit for “horse”—has firmly maintained its equine association. Of course, this is likely because it is the only piece that is able to jump over the heads of the other pieces.
Of course, the common battle tactic of flanking via leaping your horse over the other side’s lines. A very real and widespread thing that occurred in every culture that had chess.
The Prophet, who is aware of the hands which move the pieces.
The Crows, placed on the board after the final turn.
And many more: https://twitter.com/thepatanoiac/status/439992435205083136?l...