She and I both know she did not receive such an email.

She is ignoring - studiously - my questions about whether she received any confirmation emails, which are always triggered when an EFT is accepted/deposited. She is convinced that she has because she can see a note in her banking that she initiated an EFT (electronic funds transfer) payment to me. I am often flabbergasted by how stubborn some people can be when they are absolutely, categorically wrong - with written evidence - but will not back down and say, “Ah, sorry, you are right.”įor the last month, I have been trying to convince a client she has not paid me. So while Western European players had abstracted pieces that they applied local colloquial terms to (“fool”, “bishop”, “runner”), Russians apparently got pieces more closely resembling their Indian roots, or at least kept translated versions of some of the names, and retained the “elephant”.I do real estate photography. It (probably) came separately to Russia through the Silk Road. The ancestor of chess (probably) entered Western Europe through the contact between Arabs and proto-Spaniards in the Iberian peninsula. English players thought the single-forked piece looked like a bishop’s mitre, and started calling it “the bishop.” French and English chess set makers followed the naming conventions, and started making the pieces more closely resemble their names, as did illustrators. French players thought the double-forked piece looked like a fool’s cap, and started calling it “le fou”.

It was usually a simple piece with a single or double forked top (probably representing an elephant’s tusks). The Bishop (“alfil” in Spanish) is “fou” (fool or jester) in French (old diagrams in French books often show the Bishop with a jester’s cap rather than a bishop’s mitre), “слон” (elephant) in Russian, and “Läufer” (runner) in German.īy 1200 or so, the original Indian war elephant had been simplified, stylized, and abstracted to unrecognizability in European chess sets. That explains the arab name of the Bishop, among other things. It may be relevant in this context before this becomes a EN-ES glossary on chess terms to point out that the game of chess came to Europe by way of the Arabs that conquered Spain: El Libro de los Juegos was a book commissioned by Alfonso X el Sabio (the Wise One, not bad as a moniker to be remembered by, is it?) that contains the earliest European treatise on chess, it was finished 1283. Stalemate is called rey ahogado (drowned king). The promotion is called coronar un peón (to crown a pawn), castling is enrocar, the capture en passant (“in passing”) is called capturar al paso.

The King is el rey (evident), the Rook is la torre (the tower), the Knight is el caballo (the horse), the Pawn is el peón (also evident). At least not in Spain, I ignore whether there are different usages in South America. The use is indiscriminate, I believe, but some expressions require one or the other: Queen’s gambit, for instance, is gambito de dama, not gambito de reina. The Queen is refered to as la dama or la reina. The explanation given for the ethymology of the Bishop (el alfil) is the one I had read before, I guess it is true.

Chess pieces names in spanish