George Duke wrote on Tue, Aug 12, 2008 04:30 PM UTC:
Polymath Ben Franklin was first North American chess writer with
'The Morals of Chess' (1779). At Paris in 1783 Franklin received letter
from Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen, developer of automaton chess-player The
Turk. Von Kempelen showed Franklin other inventions as The Turk defeated
Franklin. [See ChessboardMath.] Now Franklin in autobiography recalls how
he used Chess to learn Italian. He played with fellow students on the
condition that the loser would have to learn pieces of Italian grammar
before next game. Likewise, figures of speech and rhetoric are
used to learn CVs this ChessboardMath2, and conversely the panoply of
chessic art can easily help build vocabulary for language and logic.