On Tue, 25 May 2004 10:23:19 +0100, Michael Everson wrote: > > Now that you mention it, it could well be that Chaturunga and Chinese > Chess both could be considered extensions to a unified Chess > repertoire: > > WHITE CHATURANGA COUNSELLOR (-> white chess queen) > WHITE CHATURANGA ELEPHANT (-> white chess bishop) > BLACK CHATURANGA COUNSELLOR (-> black chess queen) > BLACK CHATURANGA ELEPHANT (-> black chess bishop) > WHITE XIANGQI MANDARIN (advisor, assistant, guard) > WHITE XIANGQI CANNON > BLACK XIANGQI MANDARIN > BLACK XIANGQI CANNON >
I don't think that a unified chess repertoire would be useful. Although
individual pieces in chaturanga, chess, xiangqi and shogi may correspond to each other in function, they are represented differently (Western chess pieces are represented by pictures, xiangqi pieces by ideographs in a circle, shogi pieces by kanji inscriptions in a five-sided figure), so that I do not believe that there would be a single character of the "unified chess repertoire" which would be common to any two chess families. You would, I think, have to encode each set of characters used to represent games pieces separately for each chess family.
Andrew, if you look at the links in my original posting about Chaturanga you will see that "generic" Chess pieces are indeed used for these.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
