Why is a castle called a rook?

I saw that opera in a foreign language movie theater with a Black lady who was a semi-pro singer, who studied opera.

I saw it at E Street Cinema (It's on E Street in Washington DC).

The movie was a recording of a stage production. It was the closest thing to seeing it live.

I took 2 years of Latin in High School. And I was learning a little bit of Spanish and French.

I could understand the movie almost verbatim.

You can too. It is not that hard, especially if your language is Latin derived.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/gplajiw1rtp16ey/O%20Mio%20Babbino%20Caro.docx?dl=0

After watching that Opera, I immediately knew what "annulus" means on Stargate SG-1. It means "ring". Those TV writers, so precise with their language.

15:11

a comperar l'anello!

to buy the ring!

I went to see Tosca by myself, at E Street Cinema.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/enmhshkvxr4deo9/Vissi%20d%E2%80%99arte.docx?dl=0

I showed my translation to an Italian lady at work, and she said, verbatim:

"You must have been Italian in your previous life."

You should look at your own stuff.

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/murray-the-great#comment-64832479

See the chariot? Drawn by 4 horses.

A quick Google search of the Charlemagne Chessmen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne_chessmen

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/why-is-a-castle-called-a-rook?page=11#comment-89227077

Charlemagne never owned a chess set.

Nobody said he did.

It's just called that.

Bill Wall and hundreds of other posers have said so. The so-called Charlemagne set consists of pieces from at least two sets.

I've always thought of it as a rookorie where messenger birds are kept. The word rook means cheat, and the move castle is a bit of a cheat...

We are in the realm of slangs. Oral language, not written language.

It has that sound.

By hook or by crook.

Bookie.

I looked up the real word.

rookery

A colony of birds, and thieves.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rookery#English

It is not French like

deceive

deception

We're talking Film Noir, Private Eye, smack-talking femme fatales kinds talk.

You dig?

it has that rhyme-y one syllable kinda talk.

It's not Twenty-and-One.

we're playing Black Jack.

if it was called a castle you'd confuse it with castling

When I was a kid, and i came to America. After 2 years in America I could understand and speak English.

I don't know how or why. I think it was because of television. Television is narrative and contextual. Even if don't know the words, you can understand from the visual storytelling. And the words are easy because they are conversational and not literary.

Buck Rogers impressed on me subconsciously. The language is simple and clear and intelligent.

In the science fiction future of Buck Rogers, in a Star-Treky world, they lost the memory of colloquial speaking. And they revert back to the style of French speaking.

They call Black Jack, Ten and Eleven.

I subconsciously absorbed and am able to differentiate the literary way of speaking and the colloquial way of speaking from Buck Rogers.

10:36

https://archive.org/details/buckogers79a

In many European languages the piece that we English-speakers call a rook is called a tower (turm, tour, torre for example).

In French the move we call castling, where the roi (king) and the tour (rook) both move past each other, is called roque.

Stick around folks.

I'm doing One Thousand and One Arabian Nights here on Chess.com.

None of this bears any relevance to the question of why the word "rook" is used in the English language to describe that chess piece. Chess came to Europe via Persia and Arabia. In the time period when this happened the Persian word for the piece transliterates to English as "madajar" and the Arabic word transliterates as "tabya". How could either of these be the source of the English word "rook"?

@mpaetz

I don't care what it is called through different places and different times.

It's called Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in the Bruce Lee chess set.

It's called the Cannons in The Civil War Chess Set.

I only care what it is originally is. A chariot. as transmuted genes to Chinese Chess. 車. The genes are so close to Chaturanga that Elephant and Vizier still move the same way fundamentally.

The question is: how did "rook" become the English term for the chess pieces? What somebody thousands of miles away called it many centuries ago is meaningless unless we trace that usage to modern English. The European piece looks nothing like a chariot, the intermediary languages do not use words for the piece that sound anything like "rook" and there is no evidence that the original pieces and/or terms have any connection to modern English usage. If you are only interested in something completely different, why should anyone here give a d**n what you have to say?

My quote that you quoted is in response to @Batgirl assumption that it was a boat.

and @Ziryab assumption that it was a boat.

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/why-is-a-castle-called-a-rook?page=3#comment-89162375

My understanding is that it is a chariot. 車.

Any one who wants a battle

@mpaetz

It doesn't matter how "rook" finally arrived from a sound language through a game of telephone over millennias spanning the four corners of the world.

To truly figure out what something is, go by the way of a glyph language. 車.

You cannot take this for granted. Although it is probably true.

LeviAJones wrote:
from Persian رخ rokh, Sanskrit roth, meaning "chariot"

I said it was a boat in coastal parts of India. In other parts of India, it was a chariot. I made no assumption. I work from evidence.

I think H.J.R. Murray’s contention that the English rook is derived from a Persian word for chariot is the best answer to the OP’s question. At the same time, Murray’s claim is not without problems.

History is hard when evidence is thin. Vital is tolerance for ambiguity and recognition that we can only offer qualified possibilities without ever being certain. Murray does this well.

Batgirl also reads Murray.