Le fou est-il vraiment fou? Les noms des figures d’échecs dans les langues romanes

The purpose of the paper is to present and explain the etymology of some chess terms (‘chess’, ‘checkmate’) and the chessmen’s names (‘king’, ‘queen’, ‘bishop’, ‘knight’, ‘rook’ and ‘pawn’) in seven Romance languages. Numerous words referring to chess in Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Catalan, French, Italian and Romanian are analysed and compared so as to show their common history and some interesting linguistic facts that occurred during their formation.