Reflexiones sobre las denominaciones de dos piezas de ajedrez

Abstract

During the more than one thousand years the game of chess has been played in Spain, two eras saw changes in the names of one or more pieces: the 14^th and the 19^th century. In the first one, the piece that had traditionally been called alferza in Spanish and which represented a vizir went on to represent a queen and received the names reina (queen) and dama (lady). In the first half of the 19^th century, the rook, which used to be called roque, changed its name for torre, while reina became, during the second half of that same century, the only denomination for the queen. This last word was replaced with dama in chess books at the turn of the 20^th century, although the use of reina is still dominant in literature. In this article, we analyze the historical and social circumstances in which these changes occurred in order to find out which extralinguistic facts caused them.