Is Zuggewinn what we would call nowadays Tempogewinn or "gain of a tempo"?

Don't know if that link ever shared
http://chess.granz.de/ch_vocab.html

As announced some weeks ago, here I'll present an extract from Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, Lausanne and Berne 1779, Vol. 11, about
Quote:


(My translation: "The game of chess which eyerybody knows and very few people play well ...").

Quote:


"Every player has 16 pieces [the term obviously includes the pawns] devided into six ranks, (...). One puts them onto two rows [lignes] of eight pieces each, on a chessboard [échiquier] divided into 64 squares [cases = square on a chessboard, also field of a form, the term quarrées I didn't find in a {small} modern dictionnary, certainly also "square", but maybe with other connotations], (...). Each player has one unique piece called the roi [simply "king"]."

Quote:


"The names of some of the pieces mean nothing reasonable outside of oriental languages. The second piece in chess, after the king, is nowadays called reine [queen] or dame, but she did not always bear that name: In the old latin verses from the 12th century, she was called fercia [I don't know if that word had any other meaning in Latin]. Our ancient poets called that piece fierce, fierche, and fierge, corrupted forms of Latin fercia, which came from Persian ferz, which is in Persian the name of that piece and means a minister, a visir."

Quote:


"But one soon became convinced that that tableau [calling this piece a "minister"] would be an imperfect picture of human life, because one couldn't find a woman, this sex plays a too important rule for not giving it a place in the game; so one changed the "minister" or visir or ferz in lady or queen, and non-sensitively, as an outburst of gallantery typical for the nations of the West, the lady, the queen became the most considerable piece of the whole game."

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This is part I; as this work takes quite some time, I will leave the rest of it for a later occasion. Then I'll give some information about the remaining pieces and the pawns, and maybe one or two other interesting findings.

My french is not very good; so if anybody of you finds a better translation than mine, please don't hesitate to correct me.

From tomorrow on, I'll be on holidays with my wife for four weeks; we're travelling to Ghana, and I don't know if or how often I'll have internet access over there. So if you don't hear from me over the next month, don't suspect me to be dead or to have given up chess in favour of collecting stamps (although hasn't Karpow done that? I don't know how "good" a stamps collector he is, but as far as I know he used to be a chess player of reasonable strenght, wasn't he?).

All the best for you all and for the forum!

Best regards,

Zwischenzugzwang

Markovich wrote on 08/17/11 at 23:29:23:

OK, if that's the case, the definition makes sense. Thanks.

It occurs to me that a similar case is the usage of Pferd (horse) instead of Springer in German; i.e. (to vary your statement) I suspect that many Germans who play chess on a purely casual basis wouldn't think of saying "Springer".   

Markovich wrote on 08/17/11 at 23:29:23:


Doesn't that depend on the context? I expect, for example, if I asked an american (even a tournament player) to set up the pieces for a game he would place all 32 bits of wood/plastic on the board, not just the non-pawn ones. And when Gligoric's book is called "I Play Against Pieces" in English I take that to mean he plays against the opponent's entire army, not just the strongest half of it.

Pessoa wrote on 08/17/11 at 17:27:16:

Some Dutch authors use the word kasteel more or less tongue in cheek.

TalJechin wrote on 07/08/11 at 16:35:10:


Is springare used for horses apart from in chess? Probably so, but not nowadays. It's a bit interesting that "att springa" = to run, while in several languages, forms of spring relates to jumping. In general, most swedish chess terms seems related to german. We also already have dragtvång (=zugswang), mellandrag (=zwischenzug) and tidsnöd (=zeitnot).