Friday, December 02, 2011

Questions for French-speaking chess players

In English, some players are in the habit of calling the rook a "castle".

In French, do some players call the tour (rook) a château (castle)? Or do they perhaps use a different "unofficial" word, and if so, what? This does not seem likely to be answered authoritatively by a French-English dictionary. I'm not convinced that this informality of chess piece terminology would be found in any other languages; maybe English is the only one so "polluted".

I'd also be interested in knowing the analogous linguistic situation with respect to cavalier (knight) and cheval (horse).
12/5/11: My old French-French dictionnaire du francais contemporain confirmed horse is informally used for knight:
cheval: Fam. Pièce du jeu d'échecs (syn. usuel CAVALIER).
but I still hope a French speaker can comment on the rook terminology.

9 comments:

Rihel said...

In Nabokov's masterpiece, The Defense, he has a passage wherein the Russian player's aunt calls the Knight a Horse and the Rook, a "Cannon". Later, a real player provides the youngster with the correct terms. In German, I have also heard the Knights called, "Horses", but I can't remember any alternatives for the rook, or "Tower", as it is called.

Rihel said...

Ken-- an awesome article that details all the chessmen in different tongues, (mostly the 'official' names)--

http://reocities.com/TimesSquare/metro/9154/nap-pieces.htm

In note 11, they say that the Dutch also have an informal Castle name for the 'Rook'.

They also discuss in the notes the Bulgarian informal name for the Bishop that refers to WWII German soldiers. That's right-- "Fritz".

Ken said...

That's a nice page, Jason, thanks for pointing it out. I also found:

http://www.iechecs.com/pieces.htm

but neither one gives "the inside scoop" on whether (probably casual) players sometimes call the rook (tour) a castle (château) in French. I'm checking on a translation of English into French, trying to determine whether it is extraneous to say that the rook is not (officially) called a castle. That makes sense in English, but if French players would never think of calling it a château, it's probably pointless to include such a sentence.

Rihel said...

I just asked a native, non-playing French Speaker, and no other names for the Tower came to mind when I showed her the pieces.

Rihel said...

She further says, "We would 100% NEVER call that a castle, or chateau." She speculates, upon learning that English speakers do call it that, that this may be because Americans don't know what a castle looks like!

Paul MacIntyre said...

The typical Rook could pass for a parapet of a chateau-fort, n'est-ce pas?

-Paul MacIntyre

Rihel said...

I was told by the same person that every French student learns to draw a castle tower in grade school, so somehow they learn the difference between a tower and a castle at a young age. I guess(?)

Ken said...

It had been my suspicion that native French speakers would not use château (castle) for tour (rook), and I've already passed the URL for this blog entry and its comments along to the person for whom I was informally researching these questions.

I think part of the reason is that the word "rook" has little other meaning related to the appearance of the chess piece, whereas tour (tower, when used outside of the chess domain) is indeed what the piece looks like -- there would be little other reason to call it something else.

If it looks like a tour and smells like a tour, it probably is one....

Rihel said...

Ken-- Good theory! If we called it a 'Tower' in English, the public would probably call it that, too. The other piece, the 'Knight', gets mis-named a 'Horse' because that is what it looks like, AND other tongues also have an informal horse name.