Re: Names of chess pieces in (con)langs

>Are there other chess pieces whose names are
>significantly different in languages other than English,
>German and Esperanto?
Finnish, too, has knight, rook, pawn > horse, tower, soldier, but also
bishop > messenger. And the soldiers are sometimes called "louts".


>Part of me wants to name them in terms of how they move,
>seeing as this is something of an engelang, but I haven't
>figured out a concise way to do that.
>
>--
>Jim Henry
With morphemes for "orthogonal movement", "diagonal movement", "unlimited
movement" and "1-square movement" you can get already 4 of the standard
chess pieces. The standard pawn & most Shogi pieces can derived from this
with help of forward/backward limitations, but you'd need to employ some
compound-fu too, since the pawn has different rules wrt. movement and
capture, and pieces like the gold general have for-/backwards limitations
only either diagonally or orthogonally, but not for both.

Jumpers-wise, the usual x-and-y notation would probably prove useful. Knight
= 2x1 jumper, elephant = 2x2 jumper, camel = 1x3 jumper, etc.
(From a general POV, there's no reason why these pieces would HAVE to be
capable of jumping, but since that's usually the case, I'd say treat that as
the standard.)

BTW, the funniest chess-variant I've seen was about dividing housework
evenly and had multi-square pieces such as "Sofa" or "Ironing Board". :D

John Vertical