Look, look! Spain having alfil meaning elephant and Italy having alfiere meaning standart-bearer (is that a common English word?) great! Which one came for the other? Or are they oddly unrelated?
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This heathenous map adds basque and catalan, welsh, scottish gaelic, but somehow erases breton and occitan.
Based on a pass with Google Translate from "The bishop is a chesspiece in chess", I think that Occitan is l'evesque and Breton eskob.
Most of these kind of make sense, then you get stock of a gun
Elephant
Also 'elephant' in chaturanga, the game that was the ancestor of chess, and several variants.
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Great map but I don't trust the source since it cannot even be bothered to correctly mention that some languages several names for pieces. I am Slovenian and have never heard anyone refer to the bishop piece as lovec (hunter). It was always tekač or laufar (runner).
Laufar sounds like a loan word from German Läufer
Because it is.
Using my phones translator function on this image, this is what comes up.

What on Earth is a "teaspag" that it put as the Scottish one?
(Although I zoomed at a different rate and tried again and then it read "bishops")
Teaspag is Irish Gaelic for bishop
I dunno how it translates french “fou” into “new”. “fou” means mad/crazy.
I guess it’s because “fou” means “new” in Samoan. Why Samoan, though.
It mixed up umlauts on Hungarian:
Futóis the chess piece, it means runner.Fűtőmeans heater. It's strange it hallucinated 3 extra accents.
Rikis was a name for an Old Prussian or Lithuanian leader or a noble person.
I get Spain, but why is it that so often with these maps Eastern Europe shares the same word as the Arab world?
I get Spain, but why is it that so often with these maps Eastern Europe shares the same word as the Arab world?
Ottoman empire ruled the eastern Europe for some centuries and Ottoman language was a mixture of Turkish, Persian and Arabic.

but i assume that the elephant is Indian influence rather than Arabic. IIRC, that's also where the game is conceived
edit, yes, it literally is an elephant ☞ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaturanga


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