Phil Adams wrote on 08/15/11 at 14:01:42:


Yes that 's the meaning of 'remis' .ambiguous for sure

But in the past only decisive games count in a match.
So maybe the meaning when game ended in draw .You just have to replay a game latter.

Dear chess friends,

yesterday I was so tired that I forgot to give a translation of my quote. Here it is:

"This youth is called M. Philidor; he's the son of a musician with good reputation; he himself is a good musician, (...). The present day, he lives in Paris."

I once again have to say goodbye for the rest of the week, as I have to continue my invent field research of Sürǝt Ǧinetyoye. One of these weekends, some more information about chess terminology in pre-revolutionary France!

Best regards,

Zwischenzugzwang

I am not sure about my French (and to lazy to look it up), but doesnt remise also mean surrendering which would make it the same as "je propose nulle". That would mean that the French just started using another wording, while the francophiles in the other countries got stuck with the old one. Same with South-African and Dutch where a lot of Afrikaner words are "more correct" etymological speaking.

I was wondering about "remi / remis" as used in northern Europe, for a draw. I always thought it was an inspiration from French, then I happened to find out that the French says "nulle" for draw...

A little googling came up with: http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/winter22.html scroll down to item: "4367. Remismonde". But it seems a bit peculiar that a German would have to put together two French words to describe an Austrian...

Question, was "remis" used in the north before Tarrasch, or does the remis up here come from remismonde? And how come the French moved on to nulle?

I believe the German word for pawn, Bauer, can also mean or connote ‘peasant’ in addition to farmer.

The meanings of peasant and peon in English are not too far apart, and from peon to pawn is a short phonetic hop.  How’s that for a seat-of -the-pants etymology?

Hello everybody!

First of all, thank you, BabySnake, for your Icelandic contribution!

Last week, in the context of my field research, I tried to figure out some Neo-Aramaic chess terminology, but didn't succeed. One could take the Turkish expressions (as many speakers of Neo-Aramaic used to live in Turkey), or just take the shape of the pieces, which would be easy in case of the knight, which would just be süsa (in IPA-symbols: [ˈsyːsaː]) ("stallion") or maybe süsta ([ˈsʏstaː]), which is "mare" in the variety I investigate, whereas in case of the rook it would be more difficult, as there doesn't seem to be a real equivalent for "tower". I'll continue with my research.
(To be honest, there's a certain temptation for me to create the terminology from scratch, of course with a feminine 0-0 and a masculine 0-0-0 - there's a saying in linguistic circles that whoever first describes a language, also creates it up to a certain extent - but I won't be cheating, I'll promise   .)

Dear Stefan, finally I got some information about dragging dead horses! (For those of you who haven't read the beginning of this thread: This subject is off topic, we are not talking about the necessary efforts to remove knights from the chess board!). My information is from A. Wirth at Deutscher Sprachatlas in Marburg (my thanks to him!); he gave me two regionalisms:

Franconian / Fränkisch: mit dem Ofenrohr ins Gebirge schauen, "to watch the mountains with a stovepipe", and
Rheinfränkisch ("Rhine-Franconian"?): einer alten Frau 'nen Zahn ziehen, "to extract an old woman's tooth".

His comment: "Muss gerade selbst lachen, aber so sind sie eben, unsere deutschen Regionalsprachen ."

Best regards,

Zwischenzugzwang

Hello everybody!

I've tried to figure out the chess terminology for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). This is the language used in most media in the Arabic World, but it's nobody's mother tongue, as arabic children grow up with their local "dialect", and only later acquire more or less perfect knowledge of the standard language. There's no strict border between MSA and those "dialects", very roughly one could say "the more formal the context, the more MSA-like the language". So whereas e.g. political news in TV would be very much MSA, maybe sports news or society news would be more colloquial.

My list is a summary of the following sources:
- Götz Schregle, Deutsch-Arabisches Wörterbuch, Librairie du Liban Beirut 1977 (licensed edition Otto Harrassowitz Wiesbaden);
- Hans Wehr, Arabisches Wörterbuch, 4th edition, Librairie du Liban Beirut 1976 (licensed edition Otto Harrassowitz Wiesbaden);
- Chess Informant, Belgrade (CI)

The following words contain the endings, normally -un for the nominative of nouns without definite article; the rules when to pronounce this ending are a bit complicated, the "dialects" have lost them almost completely.

After this lengthy introduction, my findings:

- "Chess" is aš–šaṭranǧu, no other meaning of this word.
- "King" is either malikun (simply "king") or šāhun ("shah"), CI gives ǧanāḥu l–maliki for "king's side", so malikun seems to be o.k.
- "Queen" is either malikatun ("queen") or wazīrun ("minister"), again CI gives ǧanāḥu l–malikati.
- "Rook" could be ṭābiyatun ("fortress"), but that might be an "Egyptianism", another word is ruhhun, which is a huge legendary bird.
- "Bishop" is fílun, "elephant".
- "Knight" is given either as ḥiṣānun, "horse, stallion", or farasun, "horse, mare".
- "Pawn" is given by Schregle as ʕaskariyun, "soldier, private", but both Wehr and CI use baydaqun, Wehr doesn't give any other meaning than "pawn".

I couldn't find the expressions for 0-0 and 0-0-0.

For "mate", I found šāhun māta, "the king/shah (has) died" (Wehr) and imātatu š-šāhi, "the killing of the king/shah" (CI).

Interesting is the word for the bishops pair. The equivalent given by CI is simply al-fīlāni, "the two elephants" (MSA has - in addition to singular and plural - also a dual, and fīlāni is the dual of fīlun). Interestingly, the dual is not used for doubled pawns (at least not by CI) - CI's translation is bayādiqu muzdawiḥatun, but that seems to be wrong, as I couldn't find muzdawiḥa; instead muzdawiǧa seems to be correct with the meaning "doubled" (in Arabic script, the difference between *muzdawiḥa and muzdawiǧa is very small - only a dot within the shape of the letter). So correct seems to be bayādiqu muzdawiǧatun, with bayādiqu being the plural of baydaqun, see above.

So, that's it for now - any commentaries, verifications and corrections are highly welcome!

Best regards,

Zwischenzugzwang

MNb wrote on 07/24/11 at 21:06:25:

So it seems that the old german word with the meaning "to rob" has survived in Dutch, although within a very narrow context!?

My knowledge about onomastics (the science of origin and development of names) is quite restricted, but as far as I know the most common source for surnames in Western Europe are names of places and professions. Insofar, it seems more likely that surnames like Schach, Schacher and Schaak have an original meaning as "robber", as there were hardly a lot of professional chess players in the Middle Ages  . On the other side, one would expect rather "honourable professions" as sources for names. So I'm still not sure what to think about this.

I'll be off again the coming days, so everybody has a nice week!

Zwischenzugzwang