Why is 'x' the unknown?



Video 10 Terry Moore- Why is 'x' the unknown?

            System in Arabic called al-jebra. And al-jebr roughly translates to "the system for reconciling disparate parts." Al-jebr finally came into English as algebra. One example among many. One problem is there are some sounds in Arabic that just don't make it through a European voice box without lots of practice. . This is the letter SHeen, and it makes the sound we think of as "sh". It's also the very first letter of the word shalan, which means "something" just like the the English word "something" — some undefined, unknown thing. The problem for the Medieval Spanish scholars who were tasked with translating this material is that the letter SHeen and the word shalan can't be rendered into Spanish because Spanish doesn't have that SH, that "sh" sound. So by convention, they created a rule in which they borrowed the CK sound, "ck" sound, from the classical Greek in the form of the letter Kai. Later when this material was translated into a common European language, which is to say Latin, they simply replaced the Greek Kai with the Latin X.So, X is the unknown because you can't say "sh" in Spanish.

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