Chapter 5

5. The new chess queen: influence from draughts?
 In the preceding chapters I gave a display of the value of linguistics for the historiography of chess and draughts. Without the tools developed by linguists in the last century and a half, it had been impossible for me to prove that chess was not involved in the birth of draughts, at least not in the way Harold Murray sketched it, and neither I had been able to prove that the name of the chess queen goes back to a word used by French draughts players. In this chapter I show that the rise of the Spanish name dama ‒I adopt the thought that the new chess queen rose in Spain‒ is suggesting influence from draughts on chess. There is a suggestion. Not more, I can prove nothing.
I hide my argument behind a link. It is short but rather tough. Click here