85 lines
5.8 KiB
HTML
85 lines
5.8 KiB
HTML
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<a href='..'>back to gomepage</a>—<a href='.'>journal</a>
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<article>
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<h1 id='title'>Chess etymology adventure</h1>
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<time datetime='Thu, 16 Feb 2023 19:00:00 CST'>16 Feb 2023, 7:00 PM</time>
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<p>
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I love etymology.
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It’s so cool how every word has a little real-life story attached to it.
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But some don’t, and they make these tantalizing unresolved puzzles with a few pieces missing.
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Learning etymologies, you get a sense of how lively words are, moving around and occupying different meanings like the shifting borders of a country.
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</p><p>
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So today, I looked up the meaning of the German word <a href='https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bauer#German' target='_blank'><i>Bauer</i></a>.
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I studied some German in college, but I am rusty on it, so I thought it maybe meant “builder”.*
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It actually means “farmer”, or “peasant”, but I noticed that it’s also the German term for the pawn piece in chess.
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</p><p>
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Even better, the entry includes a table showing the names for the other chess pieces in German.
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Even better than <i>that</i>, there’s actually a <a href='https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Chess_pieces' target='_blank'>page with a big table</a> that gives the names for chess pieces in many languages.
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Just with the clicking around I’ve done so far, I’ve picked up some fascinating tidbits.
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</p><p>
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Just in the German table, I saw that the term for the bishop was <i>Läufer</i>, which means “runner”, not bishop.
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I had kind of assumed it would have been called <i>Bischof</i> in German and the equivalent of <i>bishop</i> in most languages, so that was a neat surprise.
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“Runner” is an approprite name for the piece given its function.
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</p><p>
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Another great tidbit I picked up from the German table was the word <i>Ross</i> as one of the terms for the knight.
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<i>Ross</i> means “horse”, evidently, but it’s not the common word I learned in my German class, which would have been <i>Pferd</i>.
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It’s a more archaic and poetic term for horse, perhaps like <i>steed</i> in English.
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But it’s cognate with English <i>horse</i>, because both descend from the same Germanic root <a href='https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-West_Germanic/hross' target='_blank'><i>*hross</i></a>.
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</p><p>
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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.
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For example, <i>Mädchen</i> is the normal word for “girl”, whereas its English cognate <i>maiden</i> is a more archaic word.
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So it was cool to find <i>Ross</i>–<i>horse</i>, a pair where the English is modern and the German equivalent is archaic.
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</p><p>
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The bishop wasn’t originally the bishop in English.
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First it was <i>alfin</i>, from the Arabic word for “elephant”, الفِيل (<i>al-fīl</i>).
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There are a lot of languages that still call the piece either something based on <i>al-fīl</i> or just their native word for “elephant”.
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After that, it was <i>archer</i>, which was probably a reference to its movement.
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</p><p>
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I’m still looking around to figure out how exactly <i>bishop</i> got introduced as the English word for that piece.
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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,
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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.
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Please let me know if you know any more about it.
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</p>
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<figure>
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<img src='img/old_chess.webp' width='600' height='457' />
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<figcaption>One of the oldest remaining chess sets. Check out the tusks on the bishops!</figcaption>
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</figure>
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<p>
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In a lot of languages, the rook is called something like “tower”.
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But English <i>rook</i> comes from the Persian word رخ (<i>rox</i>), which apparently is just used for the chess piece.
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Relatively few langauges use a descendant of <i>rox</i>, not even French, which is where English got it, via Old French’s <i>roc</i>.
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</p><p>
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Okay, I’d better stop myself there.
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Etymology really is one of those topics I could just talk forever about; this stuff is totally fascinating to me.
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But if I don’t stop now, we’re quickly heading towards wall-of-text territory.
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</p><p>
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Do you like etymology?
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Do you have other topics you tend to rabbit-hole on?
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Do you play chess?
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Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: <code>gome<span style='user-select: none;'> ​</span>@<span style='user-select: none;'> ​</span>ctrl-c.club</code>.
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</p><p class='footnote'>
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* I was close; <i>Bau</i> means “building” or “construction”, both the act and the result. The correct word for this kind of builder according to Wiktionary is <i>Bauarbeiter</i>.
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</p>
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