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+ +Chess etymology adventure
+ + +Big fun fact dump incoming
Chess etymology adventure
+ ++ I love etymology. + It’s so cool how every word has a little real-life story attached to it. + But some don’t, and they make these tantalizing unresolved puzzles with a few pieces missing. + Learning etymologies, you get a sense of how lively words are, moving around and occupying different meanings like the shifting borders of a country. +
+ So today, I looked up the meaning of the German word Bauer. + I studied some German in college, but I am rusty on it, so I thought it maybe meant “builder”.* + It actually means “farmer”, or “peasant”, but I noticed that it’s also the German term for the pawn piece in chess. +
+ Even better, the entry includes a table showing the names for the other chess pieces in German. + Even better than that, there’s actually a page with a big table that gives the names for chess pieces in many languages. + Just with the clicking around I’ve done so far, I’ve picked up some fascinating tidbits. +
+ Just in the German table, I saw that the term for the bishop was Läufer, which means “runner”, not bishop. + I had kind of assumed it would have been called Bischof in German and the equivalent of bishop in most languages, so that was a neat surprise. + “Runner” is an approprite name for the piece given its function. +
+ Another great tidbit I picked up from the German table was the word Ross as one of the terms for the knight. + Ross means “horse”, evidently, but it’s not the common word I learned in my German class, which would have been Pferd. + It’s a more archaic and poetic term for horse, perhaps like steed in English. + But it’s cognate with English horse, because both descend from the same Germanic root *hross. +
+ When I was learning German, I noticed that a lot of the cognates between English and German went the other way, where the modern German word was linked to an archaic-sounding English word. + For example, Mädchen is the normal word for “girl”, whereas its English cognate maiden is a more archaic word. + So it was cool to find Ross–horse, a pair where the English is modern and the German equivalent is archaic. +
+ The bishop wasn’t originally the bishop in English. + First it was alfin, from the Arabic word for “elephant”, الفِيل (al-fīl). + There are a lot of languages that still call the piece either something based on al-fīl or just their native word for “elephant”. + After that, it was archer, which was probably a reference to its movement. +
+ I’m still looking around to figure out how exactly bishop got introduced as the English word for that piece. + I always assumed the piece looked the way it did because it was meant to be a bishop’s hat, but if it’s a more recent coinage, + perhaps it got that name for the reverse reason: people noticed the elephant piece looked kind of like a bishop’s hat and started calling it that. + Please let me know if you know any more about it. +
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+ + In a lot of languages, the rook is called something like “tower”. + But English rook comes from the Persian word رخ (rox), which apparently is just used for the chess piece. + Relatively few langauges use a descendant of rox, not even French, which is where English got it, via Old French’s roc. +
+ Okay, I’d better stop myself there. + Etymology really is one of those topics I could just talk forever about; this stuff is totally fascinating to me. + But if I don’t stop now, we’re quickly heading towards wall-of-text territory. +
+ Do you like etymology?
+ Do you have other topics you tend to rabbit-hole on?
+ Do you play chess?
+ Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: gome @ ctrl-c.club.
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+ * I was close; Bau means “building” or “construction”, both the act and the result. The correct word for this kind of builder according to Wiktionary is Bauarbeiter. +
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