you wrote: "As Chess evolved the elephant was enhanced from leaping diagonally to sliding diagonally. It was at a later point that the English name (and maybe other languages) was changed to bishop while other languages, such as Spanish and Russian retained the existing name."
As the matter of fact, no, it didn't happen that way, they didn't change the name after the move was changed. The name was changed much before.
Old chess, similar to shatranj, was transmitted to Christian countries and reached England about 1050. The "Fil" was soon called Bishop there and in other Scandinavian lands. For example, the famous Lewis set has pieces depicting Bishops. The modern move for that piece (although it had some forerunners in Grant Acedrex or in Courrier Chess) has been adopted about 1475-1500. So, during almost 500 years the piece called Bishop in English was played like the one we call Alfil in our chessvariants.com pages.
Btw, same thing for the Queen, called a Queen and played as a Ferz during 500 years.
To Greg Strong:
you wrote: "As Chess evolved the elephant was enhanced from leaping diagonally to sliding diagonally. It was at a later point that the English name (and maybe other languages) was changed to bishop while other languages, such as Spanish and Russian retained the existing name."
As the matter of fact, no, it didn't happen that way, they didn't change the name after the move was changed. The name was changed much before.
Old chess, similar to shatranj, was transmitted to Christian countries and reached England about 1050. The "Fil" was soon called Bishop there and in other Scandinavian lands. For example, the famous Lewis set has pieces depicting Bishops. The modern move for that piece (although it had some forerunners in Grant Acedrex or in Courrier Chess) has been adopted about 1475-1500. So, during almost 500 years the piece called Bishop in English was played like the one we call Alfil in our chessvariants.com pages.
Btw, same thing for the Queen, called a Queen and played as a Ferz during 500 years.