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Bn Em wrote on Sun, Oct 9, 2022 05:47 PM UTC in reply to Daniel Zacharias from 02:58 AM:

At least for the Knight case I'd tend towards yes, with a qualifier for Leaping and (the small variety of) non‐leaping versions (a mao might be Chinese‐style, or orthogonal‐first, for ex.; the moa diagonal‐first, and their compound the ‘moo’ two‐path (or perhaps, following Gilman, Flexi‐path?)). Again, both elephants/dabbabas and Chinese/Korean Cannons (the latter of which arguably differ yet more fundamentally) are usually referred to this way, and the only naturally‐occurring mao is cognate to the leaping knight

As for the leaping Rook (iirc it exists in Ramayana Chess as the Buddha)… quite possibly too; it's renamed in that game most obviously because all the names are themed, and since none of the pieces are blockable it's as easily just a rule difference as a fundamentally distinct piece. At least Gilman took the same attitude for Dabbabantes and their ilk

The main exception for me is if the two are present in the same game, in which case different atomic names start to make sense (indeed even for pieces that move identically but have different behaviours outside that, e.g. promotion or royalty); and indeed while they might feel quite different to play with, it'd seem odd imo to have an array with both leaping and non‐leaping ski‐bishops, or early‐ and late‐turning manticores. Ultimately it's probably really a matter of not arbitrarily proliferating unrelated names for uncommon pieces with more (imo) similarities than differences

And yeah, M&B took me several reads before I got to the point of more‐or‐less understanding (especially since there's plenty of stuff in there that's more interesting than the reams of names), and the broken diagrams are at best distracting


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