Basically I thought this would be an interesting topic to talk about. What are different chess-related terms like in the languages you know? Anything interesting about them?
I'll start. My native language is English, and my second is Spanish. In English, the game is called 'chess', which ultimately comes from the Persian word 'shah' or 'king'. In Spanish it's 'ajedrez', from an Arabic term, ultimately derived from Persian 'shatranj' and that from 'chaturanga' in India.
Since chess came to Europe from the middle east (although its modern rules were developed in Europe), some of the pieces in European languages have names that are Arabic loanwords. For example, English has 'rook'. The other pieces have regular English names. Spanish has 'alfil' for 'bishop', though real life bishops are 'obispos', and 'roque' for 'rook' although 'torre' (tower) is more common. 'To castle' is 'enrocar' (in-rooking I guess).
Other piece names are slightly different between English and Spanish. Knights, the horse-shaped pieces, are quite logically called 'caballos' (horses) in Spanish and not 'caballeros' (knights). Queens are more commonly called 'damas' (ladies) instead of 'reinas'. And as mentioned above, rooks are torres/towers and bishops are alfiles.
In English, we call en passant 'en passant', which is a French loan of course, while in Spanish it's just a 'captura al paso'. That said, Spanish also uses the Italian loan 'fianchetto'.
I'm especially interested in knowing different chess terms in languages from the middle east or from Asian countries with their own related games (ie like Shogi or Xiangqi). Would the terms for different pieces coincide between the 2 games? I'd also love to learn about chess terminology in different native American or African languages
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