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Re: Names of chess pieces in (con)langs

From:John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
Date:Saturday, March 25, 2006, 15:50
>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