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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