There are many ways in different languages to call a bishop. Arabic ( wäziir, firzān), Russian ( ferz’), Farsi ( vazir, farzin), Uzbek ( farzin), Hindi ( farzī, wazīr) and Turkish ( vezir) among others still use the ancient word of no gender firz for today’s chess queen. In French usage reine ‘queen’ replaced fierce or fierge (from the Arabic fers) during the 14th century during the next century reine was replaced by the word dame. A Latin manuscript preserved in the Einsiedeln Monastery in Switzerland (997 AD) contains the first recorded mention of the chess queen ( regina). For example the Italians call the queen as donna (‘woman’) or more common regina (queen in Italian). The Arabic firz or firzān (counsellor) was never translated into a European language although it was adopted. But outside Europe the chess queens usually don’t have gender or the piece is masculine. Words for chess queen in European languages are generally feminine, with a few exception. Spanish and Portuguese torre, Finnish torni, French tour, Dutch toren), sometimes a large farm (Frisian stins), a ship (Russian lad’ja, transcribed also as ladya), a fortress or castle (Indonesian benteng) or a wagon (Chinese ju, Estonian vanker). The rook is a tower in many European languages (eg. The rook has many meanings in different languages. If you know more languages to be added to the table, please send me e-mail. This article is originally written in Finnish. This article presents words for chess, six chess pieces and check in 78 languages in the table. Maybe some day.Ari Luiro has created a classic webpage, Chess Pieces in Different Languages: If I had a little extra time on my hands, maybe I would do a point-by-point comparison of the two lists, to see what contradictions I might find and what unexpected commonalities might be there. You will learn about the names of the pieces in various languages-the names of the pieces being also the emphasis of my dad’s list, in addition to which both of them contain terms like check and checkmate. In both lists there is a smattering of interesting history related to the terminology. Luiro wrote his article in Finnish, but fortunately the link in the previous paragraph takes you (and me!) to an English translation. In both cases we get each name in the “foreign” language along with its literal translation.

The last chapter is a “Chess Polyglot,” listing chess terminology in the forty “major languages” of the world (by whose criteria? who knows?)-and now we find a 2021 article by Ari Luiro titled “Chess Pieces in Different Languages.” Luiro goes for 79 languages rather than 40, the extra 39 being readily accounted for by the intervening span of 72 years. Although he was primarily a neurologist, psychiatrist, writer, editor, parliamentarian, and hospital administrator, he also had deep interests in history, linguistics, and applied mathematics, all of which feature in his book. Surprisingly, given the resources available at the time, my dad wrote most of it in New Guinea and Australia he then finished writing it in New York after the war was over and he had access to pretty much all the resources he needed. Chess meant a lot to him because he learned it from his father and then wrote a book on its history, aptly titled A Short History of Chess, listed in Google Books as an “antiquarian book,” as it was written in 1943–45 and published in 1949. I never became good at it, even though my dad started me on it at an early age.

O chess pieces, what are your names (in 79 languages)? And what did my dad have to do with it?Ĭhess, of course, is endlessly fascinating.įor some reason, however, I no longer play chess. Home › Life › O chess pieces, what are your names (in 79 languages)? And what did my dad have to do with it?

Chess piece names in foreign langusages