title: Vulgar Latin

text: By the end of the first century AD the Romans had conquered the entire Mediterranean Basin and established hundreds of colonies in the conquered provinces. Over time this—along with other factors that encouraged linguistic and cultural assimilation, such as political unity, frequent travel and commerce, military service, etc.—made Latin the predominant language throughout the western Mediterranean. Latin itself was subject to the same assimilatory tendencies, such that its varieties had probably become more uniform by the time the Western Empire fell in 476 than they had been before it. That is not to say that the language had been static for all those years, but rather that ongoing changes tended to spread to all regions.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: All of these homogenizing factors were disrupted or voided by a long string of calamities. Although Justinian succeeded in reconquering Italy, Africa, and the southern part of Iberia in the period 533–554, the Empire was hit by one of the deadliest plagues in recorded history in 541, one that would recur six more times before 610. Under his successors most of the Italian peninsula was lost to the Lombards by c. 572, most of southern Iberia to the Visigoths by c. 615, and most of the Balkans to the Slavs and Avars by c. 620. All this was possible due to Roman preoccupation with wars against Persia, the last of which lasted nearly three decades and exhausted both empires. Taking advantage of this, the Arabs invaded and occupied Syria and Egypt by 642, greatly weakening the Empire and ending its centuries of domination over the Mediterranean. They went on to take the rest of North Africa by c. 699 and soon invaded the Visigothic Kingdom as well, seizing most of Iberia from it by c. 716.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: It is from approximately the seventh century onward that regional differences proliferate in the language of Latin documents, indicating the fragmentation of Latin into the incipient Romance languages. Until then Latin appears to have been remarkably homogenous, as far as can be judged from its written records, although careful statistical analysis reveals regional differences in the treatment of the Latin vowel /ĭ/ and in the progression of betacism by about the fifth century.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Over the centuries, spoken Latin lost various lexical items and replaced them with native coinages; with borrowings from neighbouring languages such as Gaulish, Germanic, or Greek; or with other native words that had undergone semantic shift. The literary language generally retained the older words, however.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: A textbook example is the general replacement of the suppletive Classical verb "ferre", meaning 'carry', with the regular "portare". Similarly, the Classical "loqui", meaning 'speak', was replaced by a variety of alternatives such as the native "fabulari" and "narrare" or the Greek borrowing "parabolare".


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Classical Latin particles fared especially poorly, with all of the following vanishing from popular speech: an, at, autem, donec, enim, etiam, haud, igitur, ita, nam, postquam, quidem, quin, quoad, quoque, sed, sive, utrum, and vel.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Many surviving words experienced a shift in meaning. Some notable cases are "civitas" ('citizenry' "→" 'city', replacing "urbs"); "focus" ('hearth' "→" 'fire', replacing "ignis"); "manducare" ('chew' "→" 'eat', replacing "edere"); "causa" ('subject matter' "→" 'thing', competing with "res"); "mittere" ('send' → 'put', competing with "ponere"); "necare" ('murder' "→" 'drown', competing with "submergere"); "pacare" ('placate' "→" 'pay', competing with "solvere"), and "totus" ('whole' "→" 'all, every', competing with "omnis").


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Front vowels in hiatus (after a consonant and before another vowel) became [j], which palatalized preceding consonants.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: The system of phonemic vowel length collapsed by the fifth century AD, leaving quality differences as the distinguishing factor between vowels; the paradigm thus changed from /ī ĭ ē ĕ ā ă ŏ ō ŭ ū/ to /i ɪ e ɛ a ɔ o ʊ u/. Concurrently, stressed vowels in open syllables lengthened.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Towards the end of the Roman Empire /ɪ/ merged with /e/ in most regions, although not in Africa or a few peripheral areas in Italy.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: It is difficult to place the point in which the definite article, absent in Latin but present in all Romance languages, arose, largely because the highly colloquial speech in which it arose was seldom written down until the daughter languages had strongly diverged; most surviving texts in early Romance show the articles fully developed.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Definite articles evolved from demonstrative pronouns or adjectives (an analogous development is found in many Indo-European languages, including Greek, Celtic and Germanic); compare the fate of the Latin demonstrative adjective , , "that", in the Romance languages, becoming French and (Old French "li", "lo", "la"), Catalan and Spanish , and , Occitan and , Portuguese and (elision of -l- is a common feature of Portuguese) and Italian , and . Sardinian went its own way here also, forming its article from , "this" ("su, sa"); some Catalan and Occitan dialects have articles from the same source. While most of the Romance languages put the article before the noun, Romanian has its own way, by putting the article after the noun, e.g. "lupul" ("the wolf" – from *"lupum illum") and "omul" ("the man" – "*homo illum"), possibly a result of being within the Balkan sprachbund.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: This demonstrative is used in a number of contexts in some early texts in ways that suggest that the Latin demonstrative was losing its force. The Vetus Latina Bible contains a passage "Est tamen ille daemon sodalis peccati" ("The devil is a companion of sin"), in a context that suggests that the word meant little more than an article. The need to translate sacred texts that were originally in Koine Greek, which had a definite article, may have given Christian Latin an incentive to choose a substitute. Aetheria uses "ipse" similarly: "per mediam vallem ipsam" ("through the middle of the valley"), suggesting that it too was weakening in force.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Another indication of the weakening of the demonstratives can be inferred from the fact that at this time, legal and similar texts begin to swarm with , , and so forth (all meaning, essentially, "aforesaid"), which seem to mean little more than "this" or "that". Gregory of Tours writes, "Erat autem... beatissimus Anianus in supradicta civitate episcopus" ("Blessed Anianus was bishop in that city.") The original Latin demonstrative adjectives were no longer felt to be strong or specific enough.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: In less formal speech, reconstructed forms suggest that the inherited Latin demonstratives were made more forceful by being compounded with (originally an interjection: "behold!"), which also spawned Italian through , a contracted form of "ecce eum". This is the origin of Old French (*"ecce ille"), (*"ecce iste") and (*"ecce hic"); Italian (*"eccum istum"), (*"eccum illum") and (now mainly Tuscan) (*"eccum tibi istum"), as well as (*"eccu hic"), (*"eccum hac"); Spanish and Occitan and Portuguese (*"eccum ille"); Spanish and Portuguese (*"eccum hac"); Spanish and Portuguese (*"eccum hic"); Portuguese (*"eccum illac") and (*"eccum inde"); Romanian (*"ecce iste") and (*"ecce ille"), and many other forms.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: On the other hand, even in the Oaths of Strasbourg, no demonstrative appears even in places where one would clearly be called for in all the later languages ("pro christian poblo" – "for the Christian people"). Using the demonstratives as articles may have still been considered overly informal for a royal oath in the 9th century. Considerable variation exists in all of the Romance vernaculars as to their actual use: in Romanian, the articles are suffixed to the noun (or an adjective preceding it), as in other languages of the Balkan sprachbund and the North Germanic languages.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: The numeral , (one) supplies the indefinite article in all cases (again, this is a common semantic development across Europe). This is anticipated in Classical Latin; Cicero writes "cum uno gladiatore nequissimo" ("with a most immoral gladiator"). This suggests that "unus" was beginning to supplant in the meaning of "a certain" or "some" by the 1st century BC.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: The three grammatical genders of Classical Latin were replaced by a two-gender system in most Romance languages.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: The neuter gender of classical Latin was in most cases identical with the masculine both syntactically and morphologically. The confusion had already started in Pompeian graffiti, e.g. "cadaver mortuus" for "cadaver mortuum" ("dead body"), and "hoc locum" for "hunc locum" ("this place"). The morphological confusion shows primarily in the adoption of the nominative ending "-us" ("-Ø" after "-r") in the "o"-declension.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: In Petronius's work, one can find "balneus" for ("bath"), "fatus" for ("fate"), "caelus" for ("heaven"), "amphitheater" for ("amphitheatre"), "vinus" for ("wine"), and conversely, "thesaurum" for ("treasure"). Most of these forms occur in the speech of one man: Trimalchion, an uneducated Greek (i.e. foreign) freedman.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: In modern Romance languages, the nominative "s"-ending has been largely abandoned, and all substantives of the "o"-declension have an ending derived from "-um": "-u", "-o", or "-Ø". E.g., masculine ("wall"), and neuter ("sky") have evolved to: Italian , ; Portuguese , ; Spanish , , Catalan , ; Romanian , "cieru>"; French , . However, Old French still had "-s" in the nominative and "-Ø" in the accusative in both words: "murs", "ciels" [nominative] – "mur", "ciel" [oblique].


title: Vulgar Latin

text: For some neuter nouns of the third declension, the oblique stem was productive; for others, the nominative/accusative form, (the two were identical in Classical Latin). Evidence suggests that the neuter gender was under pressure well back into the imperial period. French "(le)" , Catalan "(la)" , Occitan "(lo)" , Spanish "(la)" , Portuguese "(o)" , Italian language "(il)" , Leonese "(el) lleche" and Romanian "(le)" ("milk"), all derive from the non-standard but attested Latin nominative/accusative neuter or accusative masculine . In Spanish the word became feminine, while in French, Portuguese and Italian it became masculine (in Romanian it remained neuter, /). Other neuter forms, however, were preserved in Romance; Catalan and French , Leonese, Portuguese and Italian , Romanian ("name") all preserve the Latin nominative/accusative "nomen", rather than the oblique stem form *"nominem" (which nevertheless produced Spanish ).


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Most neuter nouns had plural forms ending in or ; some of these were reanalysed as feminine singulars, such as ("joy"), plural "gaudia"; the plural form lies at the root of the French feminine singular "(la)" , as well as of Catalan and Occitan "(la)" (Italian "la" is a borrowing from French); the same for ("wood stick"), plural "ligna", that originated the Catalan feminine singular noun "(la)" , Portuguese "(a)" and Spanish "(la)" . Some Romance languages still have a special form derived from the ancient neuter plural which is treated grammatically as feminine: e.g., "arm(s)" → Italian "(il)" : "(le) braccia", Romanian : "brațe(le)". Cf. also Merovingian Latin "ipsa animalia aliquas mortas fuerant".


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Alternations in Italian heteroclitic nouns such as "l'uovo fresco" ("the fresh egg") / "le uova fresche" ("the fresh eggs") are usually analysed as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, with an irregular plural in "-a". However, it is also consistent with their historical development to say that is simply a regular neuter noun (, plural "ova") and that the characteristic ending for words agreeing with these nouns is "-o" in the singular and "-e" in the plural. The same alternation in gender exists in certain Romanian nouns, but is considered regular as it is more common than in Italian. Thus, a relict neuter gender can arguably be said to persist in Italian and Romanian.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: In Portuguese, traces of the neuter plural can be found in collective formations and words meant to inform a bigger size or sturdiness. Thus, one can use "/ovos" ("egg/eggs") and "/ovas" ("roe", "a collection of eggs"), "/bordos" ("section(s) of an edge") and "/bordas" ("edge/edges"), "/sacos" ("bag/bags") and "/sacas" ("sack/sacks"), "/mantos" ("cloak/cloaks") and "/mantas" ("blanket/blankets"). Other times, it resulted in words whose gender may be changed more or less arbitrarily, like / ("fruit"), / (broth"), etc.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: These formations were especially common when they could be used to avoid irregular forms. In Latin, the names of trees were usually feminine, but many were declined in the second declension paradigm, which was dominated by masculine or neuter nouns. Latin ("pear tree"), a feminine noun with a masculine-looking ending, became masculine in Italian "(il)" and Romanian ; in French and Spanish it was replaced by the masculine derivations "(le)" , "(el)" ; and in Portuguese and Catalan by the feminine derivations "(a)" , "(la)" .


title: Vulgar Latin

text: As usual, irregularities persisted longest in frequently used forms. From the fourth declension noun "manus" ("hand"), another feminine noun with the ending "-us", Italian and Spanish derived "(la)" , Romanian "mânu>" pl (reg.)"mâini/", Catalan "(la)" , and Portuguese "(a)" , which preserve the feminine gender along with the masculine appearance.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Except for the Italian and Romanian heteroclitic nouns, other major Romance languages have no trace of neuter nouns, but still have neuter pronouns. French / / ("this"), Spanish / / ("this"), Italian: / / ("to him" /"to her" / "to it"), Catalan: , , , ("it" / "this" / "this-that" / "that over there"); Portuguese: / / ("all of him" / "all of her" / "all of it").


title: Vulgar Latin

text: In Spanish, a three-way contrast is also made with the definite articles , , and . The last is used with nouns denoting abstract categories: "lo bueno", literally "that which is good", from : good.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: The Vulgar Latin vowel shifts caused the merger of several case endings in the nominal and adjectival declensions. Some of the causes include: the loss of final "m", the merger of "ă" with "ā", and the merger of "ŭ" with "ō" (see tables). Thus, by the 5th century, the number of case contrasts had been drastically reduced.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: There also seems to be a marked tendency to confuse different forms even when they had not become homophonous (like the generally more distinct plurals), which indicates that nominal declension was shaped not only by phonetic mergers, but also by structural factors. As a result of the untenability of the noun case system after these phonetic changes, Vulgar Latin shifted from a markedly synthetic language to a more analytic one.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: The genitive case died out around the 3rd century AD, according to Meyer-Lübke, and began to be replaced by "de" + noun (which originally meant "about/concerning", weakened to "of") as early as the 2nd century BC. Exceptions of remaining genitive forms are some pronouns, certain fossilized expressions and some proper names. For example, French ("Thursday") < Old French "juesdi" < Vulgar Latin ""; Spanish "es" ("it is necessary") < "est "; and Italian ("earthquake") < "" as well as names like "Paoli", "Pieri".


title: Vulgar Latin

text: The dative case lasted longer than the genitive, even though Plautus, in the 2nd century BC, already shows some instances of substitution by the construction "ad" + accusative. For example, "ad carnuficem dabo".


title: Vulgar Latin

text: The accusative case developed as a prepositional case, displacing many instances of the ablative. Towards the end of the imperial period, the accusative came to be used more and more as a general oblique case.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Despite increasing case mergers, nominative and accusative forms seem to have remained distinct for much longer, since they are rarely confused in inscriptions. Even though Gaulish texts from the 7th century rarely confuse both forms, it is believed that both cases began to merge in Africa by the end of the empire, and a bit later in parts of Italy and Iberia. Nowadays, Romanian maintains a two-case system, while Old French and Old Occitan had a two-case subject-oblique system.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: This Old French system was based largely on whether or not the Latin case ending contained an "s" or not, with the "s" being retained but all vowels in the ending being lost (as with "veisin" below). But since this meant that it was easy to confuse the singular nominative with the plural oblique, and the plural nominative with the singular oblique, this case system ultimately collapsed as well, and Middle French adopted one case (usually the oblique) for all purposes.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Today, Romanian is generally considered the only Romance language with a surviving case system. However, some dialects of Romansh retain a special predicative form of the masculine singular identical to the plural: "il bien vin" ("the good wine") vs. "il vin ei buns" ("the wine is good"). This "predicative case" (as it is sometimes called) is a remnant of the Latin nominative in "-us".


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Loss of a productive noun case system meant that the syntactic purposes it formerly served now had to be performed by prepositions and other paraphrases. These particles increased in number, and many new ones were formed by compounding old ones. The descendant Romance languages are full of grammatical particles such as Spanish , "where", from Latin + (which in Romanian literally means "from where"/"where from"), or French , "since", from + , while the equivalent Spanish and Portuguese is "de" + "ex" + "de". Spanish and Portuguese , "after", represent "de" + "ex" + .


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Some of these new compounds appear in literary texts during the late empire; French , Spanish "de" and Portuguese "de" ("outside") all represent "de" + (Romanian – "ad" + "foris"), and we find Jerome writing "stulti, nonne qui fecit, quod de foris est, etiam id, quod de intus est fecit?" (Luke 11.40: "ye fools, did not he, that made which is without, make that which is within also?"). In some cases, compounds were created by combining a large number of particles, such as the Romanian ("just recently") from "ad" + "de" + "in" + "illa" + "hora".


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Just as in the disappearing dative case, colloquial Latin sometimes replaced the disappearing genitive case with the preposition "de" followed by the ablative, then eventually the accusative (oblique).


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Unlike in the nominal and adjectival inflections, pronouns kept great part of the case distinctions. However, many changes happened. For example, the of "ego" was lost by the end of the empire, and "eo" appears in manuscripts from the 6th century.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Classical Latin had a number of different suffixes that made adverbs from adjectives: , "dear", formed , "dearly"; , "fiercely", from ; , "often", from . All of these derivational suffixes were lost in Vulgar Latin, where adverbs were invariably formed by a feminine ablative form modifying , which was originally the ablative of "mēns", and so meant "with a ... mind". So ("quick") instead of ("quickly") gave "veloci mente" (originally "with a quick mind", "quick-mindedly")


title: Vulgar Latin

text: This explains the widespread rule for forming adverbs in many Romance languages: add the suffix -"ment(e)" to the feminine form of the adjective. The development illustrates a textbook case of grammaticalization in which an autonomous form, the noun meaning 'mind', while still in free lexical use in e.g. Italian "venire in mente" 'come to mind', becomes a productive suffix for forming adverbs in Romance such as Italian , Spanish 'clearly', with both its source and its meaning opaque in that usage other than as adverb formant.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: In general, the verbal system in the Romance languages changed less from Classical Latin than did the nominal system.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: The four conjugational classes generally survived. The second and third conjugations already had identical imperfect tense forms in Latin, and also shared a common present participle. Because of the merging of short "i" with long "ē" in most of Vulgar Latin, these two conjugations grew even closer together. Several of the most frequently-used forms became indistinguishable, while others became distinguished only by stress placement:


title: Vulgar Latin

text: These two conjugations came to be conflated in many of the Romance languages, often by merging them into a single class while taking endings from each of the original two conjugations. Which endings survived was different for each language, although most tended to favour second conjugation endings over the third conjugation. Spanish, for example, mostly eliminated the third conjugation forms in favour of second conjugation forms.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: French and Catalan did the same, but tended to generalise the third conjugation infinitive instead. Catalan in particular almost eliminated the second conjugation ending over time, reducing it to a small relic class. In Italian, the two infinitive endings remained separate (but spelled identically), while the conjugations merged in most other respects much as in the other languages. However, the third-conjugation third-person plural present ending survived in favour of the second conjugation version, and was even extended to the fourth conjugation. Romanian also maintained the distinction between the second and third conjugation endings.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: In the perfect, many languages generalized the "-aui" ending most frequently found in the first conjugation. This led to an unusual development; phonetically, the ending was treated as the diphthong rather than containing a semivowel , and in other cases the sound was simply dropped. We know this because it did not participate in the sound shift from to . Thus Latin "amaui", "amauit" ("I loved; he/she loved") in many areas became proto-Romance *"amai" and *"amaut", yielding for example Portuguese "amei", "amou". This suggests that in the spoken language, these changes in conjugation preceded the loss of .


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Another major systemic change was to the future tense, remodelled in Vulgar Latin with auxiliary verbs. A new future was originally formed with the auxiliary verb , *"amare habeo", literally "to love I have" (cf. English "I have to love", which has shades of a future meaning). This was contracted into a new future suffix in Western Romance forms, which can be seen in the following modern examples of "I will love":


title: Vulgar Latin

text: The first historical attestation of this new future can be found in a 7th-century Latin lext, the "Chronicle of Fredegar"


title: Vulgar Latin

text: A periphrastic construction of the form 'to have to' (late Latin "habere ad") used as future is characteristic of Sardinian:


title: Vulgar Latin

text: An innovative conditional (distinct from the subjunctive) also developed in the same way (infinitive + conjugated form of "habere"). The fact that the future and conditional endings were originally independent words is still evident in literary Portuguese, which in these tenses allows clitic object pronouns to be incorporated between the root of the verb and its ending: "I will love" ("eu") "amarei", but "I will love you" "amar-te-ei", from "amar" + "te" ["you"] + ("eu") "hei" = "amar" + "te" + ["h"]"ei" = "amar-te-ei".


title: Vulgar Latin

text: In Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, personal pronouns can still be omitted from verb phrases as in Latin, as the endings are still distinct enough to convey that information: "venio" > Sp "vengo" ("I come"). In French, however, all the endings are typically homophonous except the first and second person (and occasionally also third person) plural, so the pronouns are always used ("je viens") except in the imperative.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Contrary to the millennia-long continuity of much of the active verb system, which has now survived 6000 years of known evolution, the synthetic passive voice was utterly lost in Romance, being replaced with periphrastic verb forms—composed of the verb "to be" plus a passive participle—or impersonal reflexive forms—composed of a verb and a passivizing pronoun.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Apart from the grammatical and phonetic developments there were many cases of verbs merging as complex subtleties in Latin were reduced to simplified verbs in Romance. A classic example of this are the verbs expressing the concept "to go". Consider three particular verbs in Classical Latin expressing concepts of "going": , , and *"ambitare". In Spanish and Portuguese "ire" and "vadere" merged into the verb "ir", which derives some conjugated forms from "ire" and some from "vadere". "andar" was maintained as a separate verb derived from "ambitare".


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Italian instead merged "vadere" and "ambitare" into the verb . At the extreme French merged three Latin verbs with, for example, the present tense deriving from "vadere" and another verb "ambulare" (or something like it) and the future tense deriving from "ire".


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Similarly the Romance distinction between the Romance verbs for "to be", and , was lost in French as these merged into the verb . In Italian, the verb inherited both Romance meanings of "being essentially" and "being temporarily of the quality of", while specialized into a verb denoting location or dwelling, or state of health.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: The copula (that is, the verb signifying "to be") of Classical Latin was . This evolved to *"essere" in Vulgar Latin by attaching the common infinitive suffix "-re" to the classical infinitive; this produced Italian and French through Proto-Gallo-Romance *"essre" and Old French as well as Spanish and Portuguese (Romanian "a" derives from "fieri", which means "to become").


title: Vulgar Latin

text: In Vulgar Latin a second copula developed utilizing the verb , which originally meant (and is cognate with) "to stand", to denote a more temporary meaning. That is, *"essere" signified the "esse"nce, while "stare" signified the "state." "Stare" evolved to Spanish and Portuguese and Old French (both through *"estare"), Romanian "a sta" ("to stand"), using the original form for the noun ("stare"="state"/"starea"="the state"), while Italian retained the original form.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: The semantic shift that underlies this evolution is more or less as follows: A speaker of Classical Latin might have said: "vir est in foro", meaning "the man is in/at the marketplace". The same sentence in Vulgar Latin could have been *"(h)omo stat in foro", "the man stands in/at the marketplace", replacing the "est" (from "esse") with "stat" (from "stare"), because "standing" was what was perceived as what the man was actually doing.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: The use of "stare" in this case was still semantically transparent assuming that it meant "to stand", but soon the shift from "esse" to "stare" became more widespread. In the Iberian peninsula "esse" ended up only denoting natural qualities that would not change, while "stare" was applied to transient qualities and location. In Italian, "stare" is used mainly for location, transitory state of health ("sta male" 's/he is ill' but "è gracile" 's/he is puny') and, as in Spanish, for the eminently transient quality implied in a verb's progressive form, such as "sto scrivendo" to express 'I am writing'.


title: Vulgar Latin

text: The historical development of the "stare" + ablative gerund progressive tense in those Romance languages that have it seems to have been a passage from a usage such as "sto pensando" 'I stand/stay (here) in thinking', in which the "stare" form carries the full semantic load of 'stand, stay' to grammaticalization of the construction as expression of progressive aspect (Similar in concept to the Early Modern English construction of "I am a-thinking"). The process of reanalysis that took place over time bleached the semantics of "stare" so that when used in combination with the gerund the form became solely a grammatical marker of subject and tense (e.g. "sto" = subject first person singular, present; "stavo" = subject first person singular, past), no longer a lexical verb with the semantics of 'stand' (not unlike the auxiliary in compound tenses that once meant 'have, possess', but is now semantically empty: "j'ai écrit", ho scritto", he escrito", etc.). Whereas "sto scappando" would once have been semantically strange at best (?'I stay escaping'), once grammaticalization was achieved, collocation with a verb of inherent mobility was no longer contradictory, and "sto scappando" could and did become the normal way to express 'I am escaping'. (Although it might be objected that in sentences like Spanish "la catedral está en la ciudad", "the cathedral is in the city" this is also unlikely to change, but all locations are expressed through "estar" in Spanish, as this usage originally conveyed the sense of "the cathedral "stands" in the city").


title: Vulgar Latin

text: Classical Latin in most cases adopted an SOV word order in ordinary prose, although other word orders were employed, such as in poetry, enabled by inflectional marking of the grammatical function of words. However, word order in the modern Romance languages generally adopted a standard SVO word order. This had to develop as a result of stylistic changes in the language over time. The object of the word can be after the verb to break monotony of the verb final structure and/or place emphasis on the object. This style became evidently more predominant over time and widespread in Romance. Fragments of SOV word order still survive in the placement of clitic object pronouns (e.g. Spanish "yo te amo" "I love you").


title: Shogi

text: , also known as Japanese chess, is a strategy board game for two players. It is one of the most popular board games in Japan and is in the same family of games as Western chess, "chaturanga, Xiangqi", Indian chess, and "janggi". "Shōgi" means general's ("shō" ) board game ("gi" ).


title: Shogi

text: Shogi was the earliest chess-related historical game to allow captured pieces to be returned to the board by the capturing player. This drop rule is speculated to have been invented in the 15th century and possibly connected to the practice of 15th century mercenaries switching loyalties when captured instead of being killed.


title: Shogi

text: The earliest predecessor of the game, chaturanga, originated in India in the sixth century, and the game was likely transmitted to Japan via China or Korea sometime after the Nara period. Shogi in its present form was played as early as the 16th century, while a direct ancestor without the drop rule was recorded from 1210 in a historical document "Nichūreki", which is an edited copy of "Shōchūreki" and "Kaichūreki" from the late Heian period (c. 1120).


title: Shogi

text: Two players face each other across a board composed of rectangles in a grid of 9 "ranks" (rows, ) by 9 "files" (columns, ) yielding an 81 square board. In Japanese they are called "Sente" (first player) and "Gote" (second player), but in English are conventionally referred to as Black and White, with Black the first player.


title: Shogi

text: The board is nearly always rectangular, and the rectangles are undifferentiated by marking or color. Pairs of dots mark the players' promotion zones.


title: Shogi

text: Each player has a set of 20 flat wedge-shaped pentagonal pieces of slightly different sizes. Except for the kings, opposing pieces are undifferentiated by marking or color. Pieces face "forward" by having the pointed side of each piece oriented toward the opponent's side – this shows who controls the piece during play. The pieces from largest (most important) to smallest (least important) are:


title: Shogi

text: Several of these names were chosen to correspond to their rough equivalents in international chess, and not as literal translations of the Japanese names.


title: Shogi

text: Each piece has its name written on its surface in the form of two "kanji" (Chinese characters used in Japanese), usually in black ink. On the reverse side of each piece, other than the king and gold general, are one or two other characters, in amateur sets often in a different color (usually red); this side is turned face up during play to indicate that the piece has been promoted.


title: Shogi

text: Following is a table of the pieces with their Japanese representations and English equivalents. The abbreviations are used for game notation and often when referring to the pieces in speech in Japanese.


title: Shogi

text: English speakers sometimes refer to promoted bishops as "horses" and promoted rooks as "dragons", after their Japanese names, and generally use the Japanese term "tokin" for promoted pawns. Silver generals and gold generals are commonly referred to simply as "silvers" and "golds", respectively.


title: Shogi

text: The characters inscribed on the reverse sides of the pieces to indicate promotion may be in red ink, and are usually cursive. The characters on the backs of the pieces that promote to gold generals are cursive variants of 'gold', becoming more cursive (more abbreviated) as the value of the original piece decreases. These cursive forms have these equivalents in print: for promoted silver, for promoted knight, for promoted lance, and for promoted pawn (tokin). Another typographic convention has abbreviated versions of the original values, with a reduced number of strokes: for a promoted knight , for a promoted lance , and the as above for a promoted silver, but (a hiragana symbol for the syllable "to") for "tokin".


title: Shogi

text: The suggestion that the Japanese characters have deterred Western players from learning shogi has led to "Westernized" or "international" pieces which use iconic symbols instead of characters. Most players soon learn to recognize the characters, however, partially because the traditional pieces are already iconic by size, with more powerful pieces being larger. As a result, Westernized pieces have never become popular. Bilingual pieces with both Japanese characters and English captions have been developed as have pieces with animal cartoons.


title: Shogi

text: A "furigoma" 振り駒 'piece toss' is used to decide who moves first. One of the players tosses five pawns. If the number of tokins (promoted pawns, と) facing up is higher than unpromoted pawns (歩), then the player who tossed the pawns plays "gote" 後手 'white' (that is, getting the second move).


title: Shogi

text: After the piece toss "furigoma," the game proceeds. If multiple games are played, then players alternate turns for who goes first in subsequent games. (The terms "Black" and "White" are used to differentiate sides although there is no difference in the color of the pieces.) For each turn, a player may either move a piece that is currently on the board (and potentially promote it, capture an opposing piece, or both) or else drop a piece that has been previously captured onto a square of the board. These options are explained below.


title: Shogi

text: Most shogi pieces can move only to an adjacent square. A few may move across the board, and one jumps over intervening pieces.


title: Shogi

text: The lance, bishop, and rook are "ranging" pieces: They can move any number of squares along a straight line limited only by intervening pieces and the edge of the board. If an opposing piece intervenes, it may be captured by removing it from the board and replacing it with the moving piece. If a friendly piece intervenes, the moving piece must stop short of that square; if the friendly piece is adjacent, the moving piece may not move in that direction at all.


title: Shogi

text: A bishop (角) moves any number of squares in a diagonal direction. Because they cannot move orthogonally, the players' unpromoted bishops can reach only half the squares of the board, unless one is captured and then dropped.


title: Shogi

text: A gold general (金) moves one square orthogonally, or one square diagonally forward, giving it six possible destinations. It cannot move diagonally backwards.


title: Shogi

text: A silver general (銀) moves one square diagonally, or one square straight forward, giving it five possible destinations. Because an unpromoted silver can retreat more easily than a promoted one, it is common to leave a silver unpromoted at the far side of the board. (See Promotion).


title: Shogi

text: A knight (桂) jumps at an angle intermediate to orthogonal and diagonal, amounting to one square straight forward plus one square diagonally forward, in a single move. Thus the knight has two possible forward destinations. Unlike international chess knights, shogi knights cannot move to the sides or in a backwards direction. The knight is the only piece that ignores intervening pieces on the way to its destination. It is not blocked from moving if the square in front of it is occupied, but neither can it capture a piece on that square. It is often useful to leave a knight unpromoted at the far side of the board. A knight "must" promote, however, if it reaches either of the two furthest ranks. (See Promotion.)


title: Shogi

text: A lance (香) moves just like the rook except it cannot move backwards or to the sides. It is often useful to leave a lance unpromoted at the far side of the board. A lance "must" promote, however, if it reaches the furthest rank. (See Promotion.)


title: Shogi

text: A pawn (歩) moves one square straight forward. It cannot retreat. Unlike international chess pawns, shogi pawns capture the same as they move. A pawn "must" promote if it arrives at the furthest rank. (See Promotion.) In practice, however, a pawn is usually promoted whenever possible. There are two restrictions on where a pawn may be dropped. (See Drops.)


title: Shogi

text: All pieces but the knight move either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. These directions cannot be combined in a single move; one direction must be chosen.


title: Shogi

text: If a piece occupies a legal destination for an opposing piece, it may be "captured" by removing it from the board and replacing it with the opposing piece. The capturing piece may not continue beyond that square on that turn. Shogi pieces capture the same as they move.


title: Shogi

text: Normally, when moving a piece, a player snaps it to the board with the ends of the fingers of the same hand. This makes a sudden sound effect, bringing the piece to the attention of the opponent. This is also true for capturing and dropping pieces. On a traditional "shogi-ban", the pitch of the snap is deeper, delivering a subtler effect.


title: Shogi

text: A player's "promotion zone" consists of the furthest one-third of the board – the three ranks occupied by the opponent's pieces at setup. The zone is typically delineated on shogi boards by two inscribed dots. When a piece is moved, if part of the piece's path lies within the promotion zone (that is, if the piece moves into, out of, or wholly within the zone; but "not" if it is dropped into the zone – see Drops), then the player has the option to "promote" the piece at the end of the turn. Promotion is indicated by turning the piece over after it moves, revealing the character of the promoted piece.


title: Shogi

text: Promoting a piece is usually not compulsory; however, if a pawn or lance is moved to the furthest rank, or a knight is moved to either of the two furthest ranks, that piece "must" promote (otherwise, it would have no legal move on subsequent turns). A silver general is never required to promote, and it is often advantageous to keep a silver general unpromoted (it is easier, for example, to extract an unpromoted silver from behind enemy lines: a promoted silver, with only one line of retreat, can be easily blocked.) Rooks, bishops and pawns are almost always promoted, as these pieces do not lose any of their powers upon promotion.


title: Shogi

text: A promoted rook ("dragon king", 龍王 "ryūō"; alternate forms: 龍, 竜) moves as a rook and as a king. It is also called a dragon.


title: Shogi

text: A promoted bishop ("dragon horse", 龍馬 "ryūma"; alternate form: 馬) moves as a bishop and as a king. It is also known as a horse.


title: Shogi

text: A promoted silver (成銀 "narigin"; alternate forms: 全, cursive 金), a promoted knight (成桂 "narikei"; alternate forms: 圭, 今, cursive 金), a promoted lance (成香 "narikyō"; alternate forms: 杏, 仝, cursive 金) and a promoted pawn (と金 "tokin"; alternate forms: と, 个) all move the same way as a gold general. The promoted pawn is often called by its Japanese name tokin, even by non-Japanese players.


title: Shogi

text: Captured pieces are retained in hand and can be brought back into play under the capturing player's control. The Japanese term for "piece(s) in hand" is either 持ち駒 "mochigoma" or 手駒 "tegoma." On any turn, instead of moving a piece on the board, a player may select a piece in hand and place it – unpromoted side up and facing the opposing side – on any empty square. The piece is then one of that player's active pieces on the board and can be moved accordingly. This is called "dropping" the piece, or simply, a "drop". A drop counts as a complete move.


title: Shogi

text: A drop cannot capture a piece, nor does dropping within the promotion zone result in immediate promotion. Capture and/or promotion may occur normally, however, on subsequent moves of the piece.


title: Shogi

text: Restrictions. There are three restrictions on dropping pieces; the last two of these apply only to pawns.


title: Shogi

text: A corollary of the second restriction is that a player with an unpromoted pawn on every file is unable to drop a pawn anywhere. For this reason, it is common to sacrifice a pawn in order to gain flexibility for drops.


title: Shogi

text: Captured pieces are typically kept on a wooden stand (駒台 "komadai)" which is traditionally placed so that its bottom-left corner aligns with the bottom-right corner of the board from the perspective of each player. It is not permissible to hide pieces from full view.


title: Shogi

text: It is common for players to swap bishops, which oppose each other across the board, early in the game. This leaves each player with a bishop in hand to be dropped later. The ability for drops in shogi gives the game tactical richness and complexity. The fact that no piece ever goes entirely out of play accounts for the rarity of draws.


title: Shogi

text: When a player's move threatens to capture the opposing king on the next turn, the move is said to "give check" to the king and the king is said to be "in check." If a player's king is in check, that player's responding move must remove the check if possible. Ways to remove a check include moving the king away from the threat, capturing the threatening piece, or placing another interposing piece between the king and the threatening piece.


title: Shogi

text: To announce check in Japanese, one can say "ōte" (), however, this is an influence of international chess and is not required, even as a courtesy. It may be common to announce "ōte" in beginner matches or for local rules to dictate that you have to announce it. Announcing a check vocally is unheard of in serious play.


title: Shogi

text: The usual way for shogi games to end is for one side to checkmate the other side's king, after which the losing player will be given the opportunity to admit defeat. Unlike western chess or xiangqi, checkmate is almost always the result in shogi since pieces never retire from play which gives the players a sufficient number of pieces to deliver checkmate. That said, there are three other possible ways for a game to end: "repetition" ( "sennichite"), "impasse" ( "jishōgi"), and an "illegal move" (). The first two – repetition and impasse – are particularly uncommon. Illegal moves are also uncommon in professional games although this may not be true with amateur players (especially beginners).


title: Shogi

text: If the king is in check and there is no possible move which could protect the king, the move is said to "checkmate" ("tsumi" 詰み) the king. Checkmate effectively means that the opponent wins the game as the player would have no remaining legal moves. (See also: tsumeshogi, hisshi.)


title: Shogi

text: The losing player will usually resign when the situation is thought to be hopeless and may declare the resignation at any time during their turn. Although a player may resign just after they are checkmated, playing up to the checkmate point rarely occurs in practice as players normally resign as soon as a loss is deemed inevitable – such as when a "tsume" (forced mate sequence) is realized by the losing player. Similarly, if a player were to lose in an Entering King situation (see section below) by having less than 24 points (or by any of the other Impasse rules used by amateurs), then the player will usually resign before that point.


title: Shogi

text: In traditional tournament play, a formal resignation is required – that is, a checkmate is not a sufficient condition for winning. The resignation is indicated by bowing and/or saying 'I lost' (負けました "makemashita") and/or placing the right hand over the piece stands. Placing the hand over the piece stand is a vestige of an older practice of gently dropping one's pieces in hand over the board in order to indicate resignation. In western practice, a handshake may be used.


title: Shogi

text: In professional and serious (tournament) amateur games, a player who makes an illegal move loses immediately. The loss stands even if play continued and the move was discovered later in game. However, if neither the opponent nor a third party points out the illegal move and the opponent later resigned, the resignation stands as the result.


title: Shogi

text: In friendly amateur games, this rule is sometimes relaxed, and the player may be able to take back the illegal move and replay a new legal move.


title: Shogi

text: In particular, the Two Pawn violation is the most common illegal move played by professional players. The Two Pawn violation played by Takahiro Toyokawa (against Kōsuke Tamura) in the 2004 NHK Cup is infamous since it was broadcast on television. On the 109th move, Toyokawa (playing as Black) dropped a pawn to the 29 square while he already had a pawn in play on the board on the 23 square and, thus, lost the game.


title: Shogi

text: If the same game position occurs four times with the same player to move and the same pieces in hand for each player, then the game ends in a repetition draw (千日手 "sennichite," lit. "moves for a thousand days"), as long as the positions are not due to perpetual check. Perpetual check (連続王手の千日手) is an illegal move (see above), which ends the game in a loss in tournament play.


title: Shogi

text: In professional shogi, a repetition draw outcome is not a final result as draws essentially do not count. There can be only one victorious through wins. In the case of a repetition draw, professional shogi players will have to immediately play a subsequent game (or as many games as necessary) with sides reversed in order to obtain a true win outcome. (That is, the player who was White becomes Black, and vice versa.) Also, depending on the tournament, professional players play the subsequent game in the remainder of the allowed game time.


title: Shogi

text: Thus, aiming for a repetition draw may be a possible professional strategy for the White player in order to play the second replay game as Black, which has a slight statistical advantage and/or greater initiative. For instance, Bishop Exchange Fourth File Rook is a passive strategy for White with the goal of a repetition draw (as it requires two tempo losses – swinging the rook and trading the bishops) while it is a very aggressive strategy if played by Black.


title: Shogi

text: Repetition draws are rare in professional shogi occurring in about 1–2% of games and even rarer in amateur games. In professional shogi, repetition draws usually occur in the opening as certain positions are reached that are theoretically disadvantaged for both sides (reciprocal zugzwang). In amateur shogi, repetition draws tend to occur in the middle or endgame as a result of player errors.


title: Shogi

text: The game reaches an Impasse or Deadlock (持将棋 "jishōgi") if both kings have advanced into their respective promotion zones – a situation known as 相入玉 ("ai-nyū gyoku" "double entering kings") – and neither player can hope to mate the other or to gain any further material. An Impasse can result in either a win or a draw. If an Impasse happens, the winner is decided as follows: each player agrees to an Impasse, then each rook or bishop, promoted or not, scores 5 points for the owning player, and all other pieces except kings score 1 point each. A player scoring fewer than 24 points loses. (Note that in the start position, both players have 27 points each.) If neither player has fewer than 24, the game is no contest — a draw. In professional shogi, an Impasse result is always a draw since a player that cannot obtain the 24 points will simply resign. "Jishōgi" is considered an outcome in its own right rather than no contest, but there is no practical difference. As an Impasse needs to be agreed on for the rule to be invoked, a player may refuse to do so and attempt to win the game in future moves. If that happens, there is no official rule about the verdict of the game.


title: Shogi

text: However, in amateur shogi, there are different practices most of which force a win resolution to the Impasse in order to avoid a draw result.


title: Shogi

text: The first draw by Impasse occurred in 1731 in a bishop handicap game between the seventh Lifetime Meijin, , and his brother, Sōkei Ōhashi.


title: Shogi

text: As a practical matter, when an opponent's king has entered a player's own territory especially with supporting defending pieces, the opponent's king is often very difficult to mate given the forward attacking nature of most shogi pieces. This state is referred to as entering king (入玉 "nyū gyoku"). If both players' kings are in entering king states, the game becomes more likely to result in an impasse.


title: Shogi

text: In the adjacent diagram example, although White's king is in a strong Bear-in-the-hole castle, Black's king has entered White's territory making it very difficult to mate. Therefore, this position favors Black.


title: Shogi

text: An example of Entering King occurred in the fourth game of the 60th Ōi title match between Masayuki Toyoshima and Kazuki Kimura held on August 2021, 2019. After being unsuccessful in attacking Kimura and also in defending his own king within his camp, Toyoshima (playing as White) moved his king away from Kimura's attacking pieces by fleeing up the second file, ultimately entering his king into Kimura's camp by move 150. Although Toyoshima had achieved Entering King, he still had only 23 pointsone point shy of the required 24 points for an Impasse drawwhile Kimura (Black) had 31 points. Toyoshima then spent the next 134 moves trying to bring his point total, which fluctuated between 17 and 23, up to the necessary 24. By the 231st move, the game had reached a Double Entering Kings state, and by move 285 Kimura had successfully kept Toyoshima's point total at bay. Here, Toyoshima with 20 points (and Kimura at 34 points) resigned. Incidentally, this game broke the record of longest game in a title match.


title: Shogi

text: For amateur games, there are various guidances with little standardization. Fairbairn reports a practice in the 1980s (considered a rule by the now defunct Shogi Association for The West) where the dispute is resolved by either player moving all friendly pieces into the promotion zone and then the game ends with points tallied.


title: Shogi

text: Another resolution is the 27-Point (27点法) rule used for some amateur tournaments. One version of this is simply the player who has 27 or more points is the winner of the Impasse. Another version is a 27-Point Declaration rule. For instance, the Declaration rule on the online shogi site, 81Dojo, is that the player who wants to declare an Impasse win must (i) declare an intention win via Impasse, (ii) have the king in the enemy camp (the promotion zone for that player), (iii) 10 other pieces must be in the promotion zone, (iv) not be in check, (v) have time remaining, and (vi) must have 28 points if Black or 27 points if White. If all of these conditions are met, then the Impasse declarer will win the game regardless of whether the opponent objects.


title: Shogi

text: Yet another resolution to Impasse is the so-called Try Rule (トライルール "torairūru"). In this case, after both kings have entered their corresponding promotion zones, then the player who first moves the king to the opponent's king's start square (51 for Black, 59 for White) first will be the winner. As an example, the popular (Shogi Wars) app by HEROZ Inc. used the Try Rule up until 2014. (Now the app uses a variant of the 27-Point Declaration Rule – although it differs from the variant used on the 81Dojo site.) The idea of "Try Rule" was taken from rugby football (see Try (rugby)).


title: Shogi

text: In professional tournaments, the rules typically require drawn games to be replayed with sides reversed, possibly with reduced time limits. This is rare compared to chess and xiangqi, occurring at a rate of 1–2% even in amateur games.


title: Shogi

text: The 1982 "Meijin" title match between Makoto Nakahara and Hifumi Katoh was unusual in this regard with an impasse draw in the first (Double Fortress) game on April 13–14 (only the fifth draw in the then 40-year history of the tournament). This game (with Katoh as Black) lasted for 223 moves with 114 minutes spent pondering a single move. One of the reasons for the length of this game was that White (Nakahara) was very close to falling below the minimum of 24 points required for a draw. Thus, the end of the endgame was strategically about trying to keep White's points above the 24-point threshold. In this match, "sennichite" occurred in the sixth and eighth games. Thus, this best-of-seven match lasted eight games and took over three months to finish; Black did not lose a single game and the eventual victor was Katoh at 4–3.


title: Shogi

text: Professional games are timed as in international chess, but professional shogi players are almost never expected to keep time in their games. Instead a timekeeper is assigned, typically an apprentice professional. Time limits are much longer than in international chess (9 hours a side plus extra time in the prestigious "Meijin" title match), and in addition "byōyomi" (literally "second counting") is employed. This means that when the ordinary time has run out, the player will from that point on have a certain amount of time to complete every move (a "byōyomi" period), typically upwards of one minute. The final ten seconds are counted down, and if the time expires the player to move loses the game immediately. Amateurs often play with electronic clocks that beep out the final ten seconds of a "byōyomi" period, with a prolonged beep for the last five.


title: Shogi

text: Amateur players are ranked from 15 "kyū" to 1 kyū and then from 1 "dan" to 8 dan. Amateur 8 dan was previously only honorarily given to famous people. While it is now possible to win amateur 8 dan by actual strength (winning amateur Ryu-oh 3 times), this has yet to be achieved.


title: Shogi

text: Professional players operate with their own scale, from 6 kyū to 3 dan for pro-aspiring players and professional 4 dan to 9 dan for formal professional players. Amateur and professional ranks are offset (with amateur 4 dan being equivalent to professional 6 kyū).


title: Shogi

text: Shogi has a handicap system (like go) in which games between players of disparate strengths are adjusted so that the stronger player is put in a more disadvantageous position in order to compensate for the difference in playing levels. In a handicap game, one or more of White's pieces are removed from the setup, and instead White plays first.


title: Shogi

text: There are two common systems used to notate piece movements in shogi game records. One is used in Japanese language texts while a second was created for western players by George Hodges and Glyndon Townhill in the English language. This system was updated by Hosking to be closer to the Japanese standard (two numerals). Other systems are used to notate shogi board positions. Unlike chess, the origin (11 square) is at the top right of a printed position rather than the bottom left.


title: Shogi

text: In western piece movement notation, the format is the piece initial followed by the type of movement and finally the file and rank where the piece moved to. The piece initials are K (King), R (Rook), B (Bishop), G (Gold), S (Silver), N (Knight), L (Lance), and P (Pawn). Simple movement is indicated with -, captures with x, and piece drops with *. The files are indicated with numerals 1–9. The older Hodges standard used letters a–i for ranks, and the newer Hosking standard also uses numerals 1–9 for the ranks. Thus, Rx24 indicates 'rook captures on 24'. Promoted pieces are notated with + prefixed to the piece initial (e.g. +Rx24). Piece promotion is also indicated with + (e.g. S-21+) while unpromotion is indicated with = (e.g. S-21=). Piece ambiguity is resolved by notating which square a piece is moving from (e.g. N65-53+ means 'knight from 65 moves to 53 and promotes,' which distinguishes it from N45-53+).


title: Shogi

text: The Japanese notation system uses Japanese characters for pieces and promotion indication and uses Japanese numerals instead of letters for ranks. Movement type aside from drops is not indicated, and the conventions for resolving ambiguity are quite different from the western system. As examples, the western Rx24 would be ' in Japanese notation, +Rx24 would be ', S-21+ would be ', S-21= would be ', and N65-53+ would be ' showing that the leftmost knight jumped (implicitly from the 65 square), which distinguishes it from ' in which the rightmost knight jumped.


title: Shogi

text: Although not strictly part of the notational calculus for games, game results are indicated in Japanese newspapers, websites, etc. with wins indicated by a white circle and losses indicated by a black circle.


title: Shogi

text: Shogi is similar to chess but has a much larger game tree complexity because of the use of drops, greater number of pieces, and larger board size. In comparison, shogi games average about 140 (half-)moves per game (or 70 chess move-pairs) whereas chess games average about 80 moves per game (or 40 chess move-pairs) and minishogi averages about 40 moves per game (or 20 chess move-pairs).


title: Shogi

text: Like chess, however, the game can be divided into the opening, middle game and endgame, each requiring a different strategy. The opening consists of arranging one's defenses usually in a castle and positioning for attack; the mid game consists of attempting to break through the opposing defenses while maintaining one's own; and the endgame starts when one side's defenses have been compromised.


title: Shogi

text: In the adjacent diagram, Black has chosen a Ranging Rook position (specifically Fourth File Rook) where the rook has been moved leftward away from its starting position. Additionally, Black is utilizing a Silver Crown castle, which is a type of fortification structure constructed with one silver and two gold pieces and the king moved inside of the fortification – the "silver crown" name comes from the silver being positioned directly above the king's head on the 27 square as if it were a crown. In the diagram, White has chosen a Static Rook position, in which the rook remains on its starting square. This Static Rook position is specifically a type of Counter-Ranging Rook position known as Bear-in-the-hole Static Rook that uses a Bear-in-the-hole castle. The Bear-in-the-hole fortification has the king moved all the way into very edge corner of the board on the 11 square as if it were a badger in a hole with a silver moved to the 22 square in order to close up the hole and additional reinforcing golds on 31 and 32 squares. This board position required 33 moves (or 12 move pairs as counted in western chess) to construct.


title: Shogi

text: Shogi players are expected to follow etiquette in addition to rules explicitly described. Commonly accepted etiquette include the following:


title: Shogi

text: Shogi piece sets may contain two types of king pieces, (king) and (jewel). In this case, the higher classed player, in either social or genuine shogi player rank, may take the king piece. For example, in titleholder system games, the current titleholder takes the king piece as the higher.


title: Shogi

text: The higher-ranked (or older) player also sits facing the door of the room and is the person who takes the pieces out of the piece box.


title: Shogi

text: Shogi does not have a touch-move rule as in western chess tournament play or chu shogi. However, in professional games, a piece is considered to be moved when the piece has been let go of. In both amateur and professional play, any piece may be touched in order to adjust its centralization within its square (to look tidy).


title: Shogi

text: Taking back moves (待った "matta") in professional games is prohibited. However, in friendly amateur games in Japan, it is often permitted.


title: Shogi

text: Professional players are required to follow several ritualistic etiquette prescriptions such as kneeling exactly 15 centimeters from the shogi board, sitting in the formal seiza position, etc.


title: Shogi

text: Traditionally, the order of placing the pieces on the board is determined. There are two commonly used orders, the "Ōhashi" order 大橋流 and the "Itō" order 伊藤流. Placement sets pieces with multiples (generals, knights, lances) from left to right in all cases, and follows the order:


title: Shogi

text: Among amateur tournaments, the higher-ranked player or defending champion performs the piece toss. In professional games, the furigoma is done on the behalf of the higher-ranked player/champion by the timekeeper who kneels by the side of the higher-ranked player and tosses the pawn pieces onto a silk cloth. In friendly amateur games, a player will ask the opponent to toss the pawns out of politeness. Otherwise, the person who tosses the pawns can be determined by Rock–paper–scissors.


title: Shogi

text: It is not clear when chess was brought to Japan. The earliest generally accepted mention of shogi is (1058–1064) by Fujiwara Akihira. The oldest archaeological evidence is a group of 16 shogi pieces excavated from the grounds of Kōfuku-ji in Nara Prefecture. As it was physically associated with a wooden tablet written on in the sixth year of Tenki (1058), the pieces are thought to date from that period. These simple pieces were cut from a writing plaque in the same five-sided shape as modern pieces, with the names of the pieces written on them.


title: Shogi

text: The dictionary of common folk culture, (c. 1210–1221), a collection based on the two works and , describes two forms of shogi, large "(dai)" shogi and small "(shō)" shogi. These are now called Heian shogi (or Heian small shogi) and Heian dai shogi. Heian small shogi is the version on which modern shogi is based, but the "Nichūreki" states that one wins if one's opponent is reduced to a single king, indicating that drops had not yet been introduced. According to Kōji Shimizu, chief researcher at the Archaeological Institute of Kashihara, Nara Prefecture, the names of the Heian shogi pieces keep those of chaturanga (general, elephant, horse, chariot and soldier), and add to them the five treasures of Buddhism (jade, gold, silver, katsura tree, and incense).


title: Shogi

text: Around the 13th century the game of dai shogi developed, created by increasing the number of pieces in Heian shogi, as was sho shogi, which added the rook, bishop, and drunken elephant from dai shogi to Heian shogi. The drunken elephant steps one square in any direction except directly backward, and promotes to the prince, which acts as a second king and must also be captured along with the original king for the other player to win. Around the 15th century, the rules of dai shogi were simplified, creating the game of chu shogi. Chu shogi, like its parent dai shogi, contains many distinct pieces, such as the queen (identical with Western chess) and the lion (which moves like a king, but twice per turn, potentially being able to capture twice, among other idiosyncrasies). The popularity of dai shogi soon waned in favour of chu shogi, until it stopped being played commonly. Chu shogi rivalled sho shogi in popularity until the introduction of drops in the latter, upon which standard shogi became ascendant, although chu shogi was still commonly played until about World War II, especially in Kyoto.


title: Shogi

text: It is thought that the rules of standard shogi were fixed in the 16th century, when the drunken elephant was removed from the set of pieces present in sho shogi. There is no clear record of when drops were introduced, however.


title: Shogi

text: In the Edo period, shogi variants were greatly expanded: tenjiku shogi, dai dai shogi, maka dai dai shogi, tai shogi, and taikyoku shogi were all invented. It is thought that these were played to only a very limited extent, however. Both standard shogi and Go were promoted by the Tokugawa shogunate. In 1612, the shogunate passed a law giving endowments to top shogi players (). During the reign of the eighth shōgun, Tokugawa Yoshimune, castle shogi tournaments were held once a year on the 17th day of Kannazuki, corresponding to November 17, which is Shogi Day on the modern calendar.


title: Shogi

text: The title of "meijin" became hereditary in the Ōhashi and Itō families until the fall of the shogunate, when it came to be passed by recommendation. Today the title is used for the winner of the Meijin-sen competition, the first modern title match. From around 1899, newspapers began to publish records of shogi matches, and high-ranking players formed alliances with the aim of having their games published. In 1909, the was formed, and in 1924, the was formed. This was an early incarnation of the modern , or JSA, and 1924 is considered by the JSA to be the date it was founded.


title: Shogi

text: In 1935, "meijin" Kinjirō Sekine stepped down, and the rank of meijin came to be awarded to the winner of a . became the first Meijin under this system in 1937. This was the start of the (see titleholder system). After the war other tournaments were promoted to title matches, culminating with the in 1988 for the modern line-up of seven. About 200 professional shogi players compete. Each year, the title holder defends the title against a challenger chosen from knockout or round matches.


title: Shogi

text: After the Second World War, SCAP (occupational government mainly led by US) tried to eliminate all "feudal" factors from Japanese society and shogi was included in the possible list of items to be banned along with Bushido (philosophy of samurai) and other things. The reason for banning shogi for SCAP was its exceptional character as a board game seen in the usage of captured pieces. SCAP insisted that this could lead to the idea of prisoner abuse. But Kozo Masuda, then one of the top professional shogi players, when summoned to the SCAP headquarters for an investigation, criticized such understanding of shogi and insisted that it is not shogi but western chess that potentially contains the idea of prisoner abuse because it just kills the pieces of the opponent while shogi is rather democratic for giving prisoners the chance to get back into the game. Masuda also said that chess contradicts the ideal of gender equality in western society because the king shields itself behind the queen and runs away. Masuda's assertion is said to have eventually led to the exemption of shogi from the list of items to be banned.


title: Shogi

text: There are two organizations for shogi professional players in Japan: the JSA, and the , or LPSA. The JSA is the primary organization for men and women's professional shogi while the LPSA is a group of women professionals who broke away from the JSA in 2007 to establish their own independent organization. Both organize tournaments for their members and have reached an agreement to cooperate with each other to promote shogi through events and other activities. Top professional players are fairly well-paid from tournament earnings. In 2016, the highest tournament earners were Yoshiharu Habu and Akira Watanabe who earned ¥91,500,000 and ¥73,900,000. (The tenth highest earner, Kouichi Fukaura, won ¥18,490,000.)


title: Shogi

text: The JSA recognizes two categories of shogi professionals: , and . Sometimes "kishi" are addressed as , a term from Go used to distinguish "kishi" from other classes of players. JSA professional ranks and female professional ranks are not equivalent and each has their own promotion criteria and ranking system. In 2006, the JSA officially granted women "professional status". This is not equivalent, however, to the more traditional way of "gaining professional status", i.e., being promoted from the : leagues of strong amateur players aspiring to become a professional. Rather, it is a separate system especially designed for female professionals. Qualified amateurs, regardless of gender, may apply for the "Shoreikai System" and all those who successfully "graduate" are granted "kishi" status; however, no woman has yet to accomplish this feat (the highest women have reached is "Shoreikai 3 "dan" league" by Kana Satomi and Tomoka Nishiyama), so "kishi" is de facto only used to refer to male shogi professionals.


title: Shogi

text: The JSA is the only body which can organize tournaments for professionals, e.g., the eight major tournaments in the titleholder system and other professional tournaments. In 1996, Yoshiharu Habu became the only "kishi" to hold seven major titles at the same time. For female professionals, both the JSA and LPSA organize tournaments, either jointly or separately. Tournaments for amateurs may be organized by the JSA and LPSA as well as local clubs, newspapers, private corporations, educational institutions or municipal governments for cities or prefectures under the guidance of the JSA or LPSA.


title: Shogi

text: Since the 1990s, shogi has grown in popularity outside Japan, particularly in the People's Republic of China, and especially in Shanghai. The January 2006 edition of stated that there were 120,000 shogi players in Shanghai. The spread of the game to countries where Chinese characters are not in common use, however, has been slower.


title: Shogi

text: Shogi has the highest game complexity of all popular chess variants. Computers have steadily improved in playing shogi since the 1970s. In 2007, champion Yoshiharu Habu estimated the strength of the 2006 world computer shogi champion Bonanza at the level of two-dan shoreikai.


title: Shogi

text: The JSA prohibits its professionals from playing computers in public without prior permission, with the reason of promoting shogi and monetizing the computer–human events.


title: Shogi

text: On October 12, 2010, after some 35 years of development, a computer finally beat a professional player, when the top ranked female champion Ichiyo Shimizu was beaten by the Akara2010 system in a game lasting just over 6 hours.


title: Shogi

text: On July 24, 2011, computer shogi programs Bonanza and Akara crushed the amateur team of Kosaku and Shinoda in two games. The allotted time for the amateurs was one hour and then three minutes per move. The allotted time for the computer was 25 minutes and then 10 seconds per move.


title: Shogi

text: On April 20, 2013, GPS Shogi defeated 8-dan professional shogi player Hiroyuki Miura in a 102-move game which lasted over 8 hours.


title: Shogi

text: On December 13, 2015, the highest rated player on Shogi Club 24 was computer program Ponanza, rated 3455.


title: Shogi

text: On April 10, 2016, Ponanza defeated Takayuki Yamasaki, 8-dan in 85 moves. Takayuki used 7 hours 9 minutes.


title: Shogi

text: In October 2017, DeepMind claimed that its program AlphaZero, after a full nine hours of training, defeated elmo in a 100-game match, winning 90, losing 8, and drawing two.


title: Shogi

text: According to professional player Yoshiharu Habu, in Japan shogi is viewed as not merely a game as entertainment or a mind sport but is instead an art that is a part of traditional Japanese culture along with haiku, tanka, noh, ikebana, and the Japanese tea ceremony. Its elevated status was established by the "iemoto" system supported by the historical shogunate.


title: Shogi

text: The backwards "uma" (shogi horse symbol) is often featured on merchandise (such as on large decorative shogi piece sculptures, keychains, and other keepsakes) available for sale in Tendō. It also serves as a symbol of good luck. (Cf. Rabbit's foot.) There are multiple theories on its origin. One is that "uma" (うま ) spelled in the Japanese syllabary backwards is まう "mau" (舞う), which means "(to) dance" and dancing horses are a good luck omen.


title: Shogi

text: In the manga and anime series "Naruto", shogi plays an essential part in Shikamaru Nara's character development. He often plays it with his sensei, Asuma Sarutobi, apparently always beating him. When Asuma is fatally injured in battle, he reminds Shikamaru that the shogi king must always be protected, and draws a parallel between the king in shogi and the children who would grow up to take care of the Hidden Leaf (Konoha) in the future, as well as his yet-unborn daughter, Mirai, whom he wanted Shikamaru to guide.


title: Shogi

text: Shogi has been a central plot point in the manga and anime "Shion no Ō", the manga and anime "March Comes in Like a Lion", and the manga and television drama "81diver".


title: Shogi

text: In the manga and anime "Durarara!!", the information broker Izaya Orihara plays a twisted version of chess, go and shogi, where he mixes all three games into one as a representation of the battles in Ikebukuro.


title: Shogi

text: In the video game "Persona 5", the Star confidant, a girl named Hifumi Togo, is a high school shogi player looking to break into the ranks of the professionals. The player character will gain a knowledge stat when spending time with the confidant, supposedly from learning to play shogi. The abilities learned from ranking up the confidant comes from Japanese shogi terms.


title: Shogi

text: In the manga and anime "When Will Ayumu Make His Move?", second-year high school student Urushi Yaotome is the president of her school's shogi club, though the club is considered illegitimate due to not having enough members, the only other member being first-year student Ayumu Tanaka.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: Spy is a 2015 American spy action comedy film written and directed by Paul Feig. Starring Melissa McCarthy, Jason Statham, Rose Byrne, Miranda Hart, Bobby Cannavale, Allison Janney, and Jude Law, the film follows unorthodox secret agent Susan Cooper (McCarthy) as she tries to trace a stolen portable nuclear device.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: Produced by Peter Chernin, Jenno Topping, Feig, and Jessie Henderson, "Spy" had its world premiere at South by Southwest on March 15, 2015, and was theatrically released in the United States on June 5, 2015, by 20th Century Fox. The film received positive reviews from critics and grossed $235 million worldwide against a $65 million budget. It was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards: Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for McCarthy.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: Susan Cooper is a 40-year-old, single, desk-bound CIA employee who assists her partner, field agent Bradley Fine, remotely on a mission. Fine accidentally kills arms dealer Tihomir Boyanov, failing to learn the location of a suitcase nuke from him.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: Susan uncovers evidence that Rayna, Boyanov's daughter, has contacted terrorist middle man Sergio De Luca, so Fine infiltrates her home. She shoots him dead, while Susan watches helplessly online. She then reveals she knows the identities of the agency's top agents, including Rick Ford and Karen Walker. Susan, once a top trainee agent but now unknown, volunteers to track her. When her boss, Elaine Crocker, reluctantly agrees, the ultra macho Ford quits in disgust.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: With her best friend Nancy providing remote intelligence, Susan goes to Paris. Ford shows up and warns her she will fail because of her inexperience. She discovers that De Luca's office has burned down, but finds a photo of a man standing next to the fire. Ford appears, argues with Susan again and leaves. She sees the man from the photo switch Ford's backpack with one containing a bomb. Susan warns Ford in time during a Verka Serduchka concert and then pursues the man, accidentally killing him during the ensuing fight. She finds proof, on his body, that De Luca is going to Rome.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: In Rome, Susan meets her contact Aldo. She follows De Luca into a casino, where she saves Rayna's life. She invites Susan into her inner circle, taking her by private jet to Budapest. In mid-flight, the steward kills Rayna's crew, but Susan subdues him. Rayna believes her to be a CIA agent, but Susan convinces her that she was hired by her father to protect her.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: Nancy joins Susan in Budapest. After being shot at, Susan pursues and catches the would-be assassin: Karen, who sold Rayna the names of the agents. She tries to shoot Susan, but an unseen sniper kills her. Susan, Nancy and Aldo accompany Rayna to a party to meet Rayna's contact, Lia. Nancy creates a diversion, jumping on guest performer 50 Cent, so that Susan can apprehend Lia, but Ford's inopportune intervention lets her escape. Susan catches her and, during a brutal fight, is saved from death by Fine, who faked his murder and is Rayna's lover and associate.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: Rayna imprisons Susan and Aldo, but Fine visits them, revealing he is gaining Rayna's trust to locate the nuke, and he was the one who killed Karen. Susan and Aldo escape, and she follows Fine and Rayna to De Luca's mansion. There, she convinces them that the CIA has mistreated her, and she will do anything to protect Fine, admitting she loves him.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: Terrorist Solsa Dudaev arrives, gives De Luca a suitcase full of diamonds, and Rayna produces the device. De Luca has Dudaev and his men killed, revealing his plan to resell the device to another buyer, then prepares to shoot Rayna. Ford distracts him, allowing Susan to kill his men.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: De Luca escapes by helicopter with the device and the diamonds, but Susan grabs onto the landing gear. In the ensuing struggle, Susan throws the diamonds and the device into the lake below. De Luca attempts to shoot Susan, but Nancy, following in 50 Cent's helicopter, shoots him before he can. De Luca falls out of the helicopter into the lake.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: The nuke is retrieved and Rayna is arrested, but she makes peace with Susan. Ford, realizing he had underestimated Susan, finally compliments her skills. Crocker tells her she will remain a field agent, and that her next assignment is in Prague. Fine invites Susan to dinner, but she opts for a night out with Nancy. The next morning, Susan wakes up in bed next to Ford and screams, while Ford claims she "loved it".


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: On June 18, 2013, it was announced that Paul Feig was developing "Susan Cooper", a female spy comedy, for 20th Century Fox. Feig wrote and directed the film. Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping produced the film under the Chernin Entertainment banner, with Feig and Jessie Henderson for Feigco Entertainment. On November 12, 2013, Fox announced a release date of May 22, 2015. On March 28, 2014, the film's title was changed to "Spy".


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: On July 25, 2013, it was confirmed that Melissa McCarthy was in negotiations to play the title role. Zooey Deschanel was originally slated to play the role of Elaine Crocker but left the project. On October 17, Rose Byrne joined the cast of the film. Throughout 2014, Jason Statham, Jude Law, Nargis Fakhri, Miranda Hart, Bobby Cannavale, Peter Serafinowicz, Björn Gustafsson. Morena Baccarin, Allison Janney, Zach Woods and Jessica Chaffin joined the cast, along with 50 Cent, who would be playing himself, and Nia Long, who did not appear in the finished film.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: Principal photography and production began on March 31, 2014, in Budapest, Hungary. On May 27, filming was under way in Budapest and was about to wrap up. Apart from tax breaks, shooting was primarily done in Budapest because its architecture and location could allow it to appear as other places where the story took place, including Paris. A prosthetic was used for shots of Nicola (Julian Miller) exposing himself. The production team of Spy had to present prosthetics used in the shots to the MPAA for rating.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: The US release of film was originally scheduled for May 22, 2015, by 20th Century Fox. In March 2015, the date was pushed back to June 5, 2015, which was first assigned to "" and "Paper Towns"; the former of which being taken off the schedule and cancelled, while the latter moved to July. Prior to its official release, Paul Feig stated that "Spy" went through about 10 test screenings, a process – which includes recording the audience laughter for each version – he does "religiously", with Judd Apatow (who produced the Feig-directed "Bridesmaids") commenting on its usefulness for a comedy film: "It doesn't work very well if a movie is supposed to make you feel difficult emotions. If you're making a David Lynch movie, it doesn't work at all. But for comedy it's often the best way to refine jokes."


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: "Spy" was released on May 21, 2015 in Australia, Malaysia and Vietnam, and of May 28, 2015 in Israel and May 29, 2015 in Norway.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: "Spy" grossed $110.8 million in North America and $124.8 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $235.6 million, against a budget of $65 million.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: In North America, the film made $1.5 million from its early Thursday night showings and an estimated $10.3 million on its opening day from 3,711 theaters, coming at second place at the box office behind fellow new release "". It would go on to top the box office in its opening weekend, earning $29 million. The film dropped 46% in its sophomore weekend to $15.6 million, finishing second behind newcomer "Jurassic World".


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: Outside North America, "Spy" opened in ten foreign markets on May 22, 2015, earning $12.7 million in its opening weekend from 1,810 screens, and coming in fourth place at the box office (behind "", "Tomorrowland", and "Pitch Perfect 2"). In the UK, Ireland and Malta, it opened with $3.9 million. The film had successful openings in South Korea ($4.8 million), Russia and the CIS ($3.1 million), Australia ($2.9 million), Mexico ($1.6 million) and Taiwan ($1.3 million).


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: "Spy" received praise for Feig's direction and screenplay, McCarthy and Byrne's performances, as well as Statham's surprise comedic role. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 95% based on 259 reviews, with an average rating of 7.30/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Simultaneously broad and progressive, "Spy" offers further proof that Melissa McCarthy and writer-director Paul Feig bring out the best in one another — and delivers scores of belly laughs along the way." On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 75 out of 100, based on 40 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". In CinemaScore polls, audiences gave the film an average score of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: McCarthy's performance was praised by critics. Richard Roeper of "The Chicago Sun Times" called her "as funny and as winning as anyone in the movies these days". Tom Russo of "The Boston Globe" credited the film's success to McCarthy, writing, "part of what makes the action comedy such a loopy blast is the identity shifts she pulls on the audience." Bill Goodykoontz of "Arizona Republic" called the film McCarthy's return to form, writing "Finally, after the promise shown in "Bridesmaids", but sold short since by weak scripts in films like "Tammy" and "Identity Thief", Melissa McCarthy gets a movie vehicle worthy of her talents."


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: In addition to McCarthy's, many of the supporting cast members' performances were praised, particularly Byrne's and Statham's. John Boone of "Entertainment Tonight" said Statham "twists his action hero persona into a delightfully delusional version of the same thing", and praised Byrne's performance, writing "For every joke that McCarthy's Susan Cooper ends up as the butt of, Byrne is the one teeing it up with perfectly understated wickedness. She can so easily spit out lines as offensive as, after Cooper delivers a punny cheers, "What a stupid, f**king toast," but make it...charming?" Peter Travers of "Rolling Stone" called Byrne's comedic timing "bitchy perfection".


title: Spy (2015 film)

text: In a May 2015 interview with "The Guardian", Paul Feig said he was already writing a sequel, that includes Jason Statham's Agent Ford, though the project doesn't have a producer. In 2019, Feig explained that although a sequel to "Spy" could still happen, "there hasn't been any interest from the studio" in the project.


title: Chicano

text: Chicano or Chicana is a chosen identity for many Mexican Americans in the United States. The label "Chicano" is sometimes used interchangeably with "Mexican American", although the terms have different meanings. While Mexican-American identity was related to encouraging assimilation into White American society and separating the community from the African-American political struggle, Chicano identity emerged among anti-assimilationist youth. Some belonged to the Pachuco subculture, and claimed the term (which had previously been a classist and racist slur).


title: Chicano

text: The term "Chicano" was widely reclaimed by ethnic Mexicans in the 1960s and 1970s to express political empowerment, ethnic solidarity, and pride in being of Indigenous descent (with many using the Nahuatl language), diverging from the more assimilationist "Mexican American" term. Chicano Movement leaders collaborated with Black Power movement. Chicano youth in "barrios" rejected cultural assimilation into whiteness and embraced their identity and worldview as a form of empowerment and resistance.


title: Chicano

text: The Chicano Movement faltered by the mid-1970s as a result of external and internal pressures. It was under state surveillance, infiltration, and repression by U.S. government agencies, informants, and agent provocateurs, such as through COINTELPRO. At the same time, the Movement had a hyper-fixation on masculine pride and machismo, which excluded Chicanas and queer Chicanos from the movement. In addition, young people had fading interest in Chicano nationalist constructs, such as Aztlán. By the late 1970s and 1980s, assimilation and economic mobility became goals of many Mexican Americans in an era of conservatism, who instead began to identify as "Hispanic" or Latino. The term "Hispanic" emerged from a collaboration between the U.S. government and Mexican-American political elites in the Hispanic Caucus of Congress, who wanted to encourage assimilation into 'mainstream' American society by departing from the radical politics of Chicano identity and to distinguish themselves from what they considered to be the 'militant' Black Caucus.


title: Chicano

text: "Chicano" had "lost its fire", as summarized by Earl Shorris. However, Chicanos continued to participate in building the foundations of the feminist, gay and lesbian, and anti-apartheid movements of the 1980s, which maintained the term's relevance at the grassroots level. After a decade of "Hispanic" dominance, Chicano student activism amidst the early 1990s recession and the anti-Gulf War movement provoked a revival of Chicano identity and a demand for the expansion of Chicano studies programs. Chicanas, rather than Chicanos, became active at the forefront of Chicana movements and were critical in elevating Chicana identity. Though they faced critiques from "movement loyalists", Chicana feminists worked to address social problems of employment discrimination, environmental racism, healthcare, sexual violence, and capitalist exploitation in their communities and in solidarity with the Third World. While there had previously been widespread repression of the non-masculine and non-heteronormative Chicano subject in the Chicano Movement, Chicana feminists critiqued Chicano patriarchal authority as a legacy of colonization. They worked to "to liberate her "entire people""; not to oppress men, but to be equal partners in the movement.


title: Chicano

text: "Xicanisma", coined by Ana Castillo in 1994, gained some recognition among Chicana feminists, scholars and artists by the early 2000s and indicate efforts to shift away from the patriarchal overtones of "Chicanismo". The "X" was also a symbolic gesture toward acknowledging Indigenous roots while recognizing the need to support Indigenous sovereignty. Building solidarity with undocumented immigrants also became important, despite issues of legal status and economic competitiveness at times working to maintain distance between groups.


title: Chicano

text: In the 2000s, the Chicano worldview increasingly became transnational, informed by and expanding upon earlier traditions of anti-imperialism and Third World solidarity in the Chicano Movement. Chicanas connected U.S. foreign interventions abroad with domestic racial politics, and committed themselves to "the struggle for social justice of citizens and non-citizens". They emphasized that, while their struggles were not identical, they were "equally rooted in power imbalances between the First World and the Third World." In the 2010s, the Chicano identity was revived based on ethnic pride, Indigenous consciousness, cultural expression, defense of immigrants, and the rights of women and queer people; some even referred to it as a 'renaissance'. In the late 2010s, Xicanx identity emerged, indicating another shift. The term has been described as openly inclusive to people beyond Mexican origin and representative of a connection to Indigeneity, decolonial consciousness, deconstructing the gender binary, and transnational solidarity.


title: Chicano

text: The etymology of the term "Chicano" is not definitive and has been debated by historians, scholars, and activists. Although there has been controversy over the origins of "Chicano", community conscience reportedly remains strong among those who claim the identity.


title: Chicano

text: "Chicano" is believed by some scholars to be a Spanish language derivative of an older Nahuatl word Mexitli ("Meh-shee-tlee"). Mexitli formed part of the expression "Huitzilopochtlil Mexitli"—a reference to the historic migration of the Mexica people from their homeland of Aztlán to the Oaxaca Valley. Mexitli is the linguistic progenitor or root of the word "Mexica", referring to the Mexica people, and its singular form "Mexihcatl" (). The "x" in Mexihcatl represents an /ʃ/ or "sh" sound in both Nahuatl and early modern Spanish, while the glottal stop in the middle of the Nahuatl word disappeared.


title: Chicano

text: The word "Chicano" thus more directly derives from the loss of the initial syllable of "Mexicano" (Mexican). According to Villanueva, "given that the velar (x) is a palatal phoneme (S) with the spelling (sh)", in accordance with the Indigenous phonological system of the Mexicas ("Meshicas"), it would become "Meshicano" or "Mechicano". Some Chicanos further replace the "ch" with the letter "x", forming "Xicano", as a means of reclaiming and reverting to the Nahuatl use of the "x" sound. The first two syllables of "Xicano" are therefore in Nahuatl while the last syllable is Castilian.


title: Chicano

text: In Mexico's Indigenous regions, the residents refer to members of the non-indigenous majority as "mexicanos", referring to the modern nation. Among themselves the speaker identifies by their ' (village or tribal) identity, such as Mayan, Zapotec, Mixtec, Huasteco, or any of hundreds of other indigenous groups. Thus, a newly emigrated Nahuatl speaker in an urban center might have referred to his cultural relatives in this country, different from himself, as ', shortened to "Chicanos".


title: Chicano

text: The town of "Chicana" was shown on the Gutiérrez 1562 New World map near the mouth of the Colorado River, and is probably pre-Columbian in origin. The town was again included on , a 1566 French map by Paolo Forlani. Scholar Roberto Cintli Rodríguez places the location of "Chicana" at the mouth of the Colorado River, near present-day Yuma, Arizona. An 18th century map of the Nayarit Missions used the name "Xicana" for a town near the same location of "Chicana", which is considered to be the oldest recorded usage of the term.


title: Chicano

text: A gunboat, the "Chicana", was sold in 1857 to Jose Maria Carvajal to ship arms on the Rio Grande. The King and Kenedy firm submitted a voucher to the Joint Claims Commission of the United States in 1870 to cover the costs of this gunboat's conversion from a passenger steamer. No explanation for the boat's name is known.


title: Chicano

text: The Chicano poet and writer Tino Villanueva traced the first documented use of the term as an ethnonym to 1911, as referenced in a then-unpublished essay by University of Texas anthropologist José Limón. Linguists Edward R. Simmen and Richard F. Bauerle report the use of the term in an essay by Mexican-American writer, Mario Suárez, published in the "Arizona Quarterly" in 1947. There is ample literary evidence to substantiate that "Chicano" is a long-standing endonym, as a large body of Chicano literature pre-dates the 1950s.


title: Chicano

text: In the 1940s and 1950s, "Chicano" was reclaimed by pachucos as an expression of defiance to Anglo-American society. "Chicano" at this time was still widely used among English and Spanish speakers as a classist and racial slur to refer to working class Mexican American people in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. In Mexico, the term was used interchangeably with "Pocho" "to deride Mexicans living in the United States, and especially their U.S.-born children, for losing their culture, customs, and language." The Mexican archeologist and anthropologist Manuel Gamio reported in 1930 that the term "Chicamo" (with an "m") was used as a derogatory term by Hispanic Texans for recently arrived Mexican immigrants displaced during the Mexican Revolution in the beginning of the early 20th century.


title: Chicano

text: By the mid-20th century, "Chicano" began to be used to reference those who resisted total assimilation, while "Pocho" referred (often pejoratively) to those who strongly advocated for assimilation. In his essay "Chicanismo" in "The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures" (2002), José Cuéllar, dates the transition from derisive to positive to the late 1950s, with increasing usage by young Mexican-American high school students. These younger, politically aware, Mexican Americans adopted the term "as an act of political defiance and ethnic pride", similar to the reclamation of "Black" by African Americans. The Chicano Movement of the 1960s and early 1970s furthered the reclamation process of "Chicano", challenging those who used as a term of derision on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border.


title: Chicano

text: Demographic differences in the adoption of Chicano identity occurred; because of the prior vulgar connotations, it was more likely to be used by males than females, and less likely to be used among those of higher socioeconomic status. Usage was also generational, with the more assimilated third-generation members (again, more likely male) likely to adopt the usage. This group was also younger, of more radical persuasion, and less connected to a Mexican cultural heritage. Ana Castillo notes an example of how "Chicana" has been used as a classist term of derision to refer to "[a] marginalized, brown woman who is treated as a foreigner and is expected to do menial labor and ask nothing of the society in which she lives." Castillo herself considers "Chicano" to be a positive identity of self-determination and political solidarity. Some identify that "Chicano" is widely known and used in Mexico and may still be associated with a Mexican American person of low importance, class, and poor morals (similar to the terms "Cholo", "Chulo" and "Majo").


title: Chicano

text: Chicano identity was widely reclaimed in the 1960s and 1970s by Mexican Americans as a means of asserting their own ethnic, political, and cultural identity while rejecting and resisting assimilation into whiteness, systematic racism and stereotypes, colonialism, and the American nation-state. Chicano identity was also founded on the need to create alliances with other oppressed ethnic and Third World peoples while protesting U.S. imperialism. Chicano identity was organized around seven objectives: unity, economy, education, institutions, self-defense, culture, and political liberation, in an effort to bridge regional and class divisions among people of Mexican descent. The notion of Aztlán, a mythical homeland claimed to be located in the southwestern United States, mobilized Mexican Americans to take social and political action. Chicanos originally espoused the belief in "Chicano" as a unifying "mestizo" identity and also centered their platform in the masculine body.