names of chess pieces in different languages

Even the Queen is known as a 'lady' (and not Königin/drottning, as one might expect). Pawn and Bauer/bonde have some overlap but are still distinct conceptual entities. So the knight was not a horseman but a 'jumper', and the bishop was not a man of the cloth but a 'runner'. Germans (and slightly later presumably Scandinavian speakers, probably mediated via German) must when the game arrived on their shores have seen the pieces of the newly introduced game and associated them with different things than did speakers of English. It's interesting how the various pieces have been named and conceptualized in different languages. Rook: German = Turm 'tower' Swedish = torn 'tower'Īs you can see, Scandinavian (here represented by Swedish) tends to follow the German model, rather than the English-language one.

Queen: German = Dame 'lady' Swedish = dam 'lady' Pawn: German = Bauer 'farmer, peasant' Swedish = bonde 'farmer, peasant' Knight: German = Springer 'jumper' Swedish = springare 'jumper'īishop: German = Läufer 'runner' Swedish = löpare 'runner' I can only speak for German and Scandinavian, but, in contrast to English, the names of the following pieces are:

Names of chess pieces in different languages