Fun fact: zero and numerals were not invented by the Arabs. The Arabs learnt the concept & use of mathematical zero, numerals, decimal system, mathematical calculations, etc. from the ancient Hindus/Indians.
And from the Arabs, the Europeans learnt it.
Persian scholar Al Khwarizmi translated and used the Hindu/Indian numerals (including concept of mathematical zero) and "Sulba Sutras" (Hindu/Indian methods of mathematical problem solving) into the text Al-Jabr, which the Europeans translated as "Algebra" (yup, that branch of mathematics that all schoolkids worldwide learn from kindergarten).
Yeah I believe modern trigonometry and the terms sine and cos also trace their origins to Sanskrit through Arabic. It's a shame that ancient/medieval India contributed so much to science and math but hasn't been able to innovate in centuries past :(
The word "Trigonometry" itself is of Sanskrit origin: Tri (three) + kona (corner/angle) + niti (measure). The word "meter" or "metre" is from Sanskrit "Miti" (मिती) (meaning: measure/measurement). The decimal system of weights and counting we all know so well is of Indian origin too.
India was enslaved and exploited for centuries. By the people who stole its ideas and claimed them as their own.
But greatness can only be suppressed for a while, sooner or later, it will show itself.
The world will heal from its wounds, and the truths shall surface again.
India is #5 world economy now, by the way, and will become #3 before the end of this decade. Not bad for a nation that was still a slave just a few decades ago.
Did you know..
Ancient India (subcontinent) was world #1 economy for thousands of years? Guess who made it poor?
Start with love of the domain and a culture of respect working in it, then move to a love of the status and respect, then a focus on those instead of the domain…
Origin trivia: Originating from the Sanskrit word for zero शून्य (śuṇya), via the Arabic word صفر (ṣifr), the word "cipher" spread to Europe as part of the Arabic numeral system during the Middle Ages.
Fun fact: The Sanskrit word for mathematical zero and emptiness/voidness is the same: Shunya (शून्य). In fact, mathematicians are of the opinion that ancient Indians were among the first to understand the concept of mathematical zero because they understood the meaning of empty/void (Shunyata). Dhyana (meditation by focusing on voidness/stillness, away from random intrusive thoughts) is an aspect of Yoga (world's oldest active fitness discipline).
Another fun fact: The world's oldest recorded cipher (as an example of cryptography/ encryption) is the ancient Indian epic Ramayana by Maharshi Valmiki. It has 24000 verses (Sanskrit shlokas), and the first syllable (akshara) of each 1000th verse/shloka forms a series of 24 syllables that form the sacred Sri Gayatri Mantra.
Proofs of oldest records mathematical zero being of Indian origin, are available..
When someone says "it still means zero" about Tamil when responding to comments about Arabic, two languages which have no shared root and little similarity, what does that mean?
The original comment was about one language that borrowed cipher from Arabic (i.e. English) where the word no longer means zero. So my comment was about a different language that also borrowed the word cipher (i.e. Tamil) where it still retains that meaning.
Cipher and "Arabic" numerals are not just loan words, they are loan concepts - from India. They originated from ancient India, because the Arabs adopted and translated those ideas and texts from the original texts written by ancient Indians/Hindus.
Fact - Origin of Numerals and Mathematical Zero:
Mathematical zero and numerals were not discovered/invented by the Arabs. There is no such thing as "Arabic" numerals because the Arabs did NOT invent numerals or cipher (to represent emptiness and/or mathematical zero).
The Arabs learnt the concept & use of mathematical zero, numerals, decimal system, complex mathematical calculations (including the subjects we call today as Algebra, Calculus, Trignometry), etc. from the ancient Hindus/Indians. And from the Arabs, the Europeans learnt it all.
Persian scholar Al Khwarizmi translated and used the Hindu/Indian numerals (including concept of mathematical zero) and "Sulba Sutras" (Hindu/Indian methods of mathematical problem solving) into the text Al-Jabr, which the Europeans translated as "Algebra" (yup, that branch of mathematics that all schoolkids worldwide learn from kindergarten).
Origin trivia: Originating from the Sanskrit word for zero शून्य (śuṇya), via the Arabic word صفر (ṣifr), the word "cipher" spread to Europe as part of the Arabic numeral system during the Middle Ages.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/cipher
Fun fact: The Sanskrit word for mathematical zero and emptiness/voidness is the same: Shunya (शून्य). In fact, mathematicians are of the opinion that ancient Indians were among the first to understand the concept of mathematical zero because they understood the meaning of empty/void (Shunyata). Dhyana (meditation by focusing on voidness/stillness, away from random intrusive thoughts) is an aspect of Yoga (world's oldest active fitness discipline).
Another fun fact: The world's oldest recorded cipher (as an example of cryptography/ encryption) is the ancient Indian epic Ramayana by Maharshi Valmiki. It has 24000 verses (Sanskrit shlokas), and the first syllable (akshara) of each 1000th verse/shloka forms a series of 24 syllables that form the sacred Sri Gayatri Mantra.
Proofs of oldest records mathematical zero being of Indian origin, are available..
Bakhshali manuscript (stored in Oxford) from ancient India/Bharat - is the world's oldest text having Mathematical Zero and equations.
World should know the vital mathematical concepts & representations of numerals, decimal system, binary system, algebra, calculus, trigonometry, etc. we know and use today are originated from Indian/Hindu texts and scholars.
Both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz claimed to be The Father of Calculus, but reality is that they likely learnt it from maths-savvy Jesuit missionaries who themselves simply carried the knowledge of Calculus to Europe from its source: The Kerala School of Mathematics from Malabar, India.
Wikipedia used to mention that the "Arabic" numerals are originated from "Hindu" numerals, but I see that origin has been removed from Wikipedia. It is sad when historical truths are hidden from the world, and mistruths are propagated instead.
By the way, Tamil and Sanskrit are the oldest extant (active) languages in the world.
While the use of zero and of the positional writing system for numbers have become widespread in Europe after taking them from the Arabs, which had previously taken them from India, these were already known in the Ancient World, both in Ancient Greece and even earlier in Assyria and Babylonia.
However, in the Ancient World the use of zero and positional numbers was restricted to some special applications, e.g. in astronomical tables, and it was unknown for most of the people.
The most novel feature of the Indian system was the application of the positional principle to decimal numbers, instead of sexagesimal numbers, and not the use of zero, which did not differ much from how it was used earlier.
So is Gemini. but from it I gather there might be something interesting about a word that "loops back" (geographically) but evolutionarily speaking it was a reworking of _independent_ discoveries of "emptiness"
Eyeballing the Wikipedia page, and out of the only scripts I could read, I counted 72 languages that used a direct transcription of "sushi". It isn’t as much a superpower as a thing languages do in general.
lol I never made that connection — in Turkish, zero is sıfır, which does sound a lot like cipher. Also, password is şifre, which again sounds similar. Looking online, apparently the path is sifr (Arabic, meaning zero) -> cifre (French, first meaning zero, then any numeral, then coded message) -> şifre (Turkish, code/cipher)
Nice! Imagine the second meaning going back to Arabic and now it's a full loop! It can even override the original meaning given enough time and popularity (not especially for "zero", but possibly for another full-loop word).
The Turkish password word may be the same used for signature? I suspect so, because in Greek we have the Greek word for signature but also a Turkish loan word τζίφρα (djifra).
Spouse of a linguist here. That is absolutely not true. To summarize a LOT, there are multiple languages that share common roots, which linguists classify into language "families". If you go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_families#Spok... and sort the list by number of current speakers (which adds up to far more than the population of the world because so many people speak two or more languages), you'll find the top five language families are Indo-European (which includes most European languages, including English), Sino-Tibetan (which includes Chinese), Atlantic-Congo (which includes Bantu and many other languages spoken in Africa, most of which you probably won't have heard of unless you're a linguist or you live in Africa), Afroasiatic (which includes Arabic), and Austronesian (which includes Tagalog, which you might know by the name Filipino).
It might be possible to claim that the Afroasiatic languages are all derived from Arabic, but the only influence that the Arabic language has had on Indo-European languages such as English is via loanwords (like algebra, for example). This does not make English a derivative of Arabic any more than Japanese (which has borrowed several English words such as カメラ, "kamera", from camera) is a derivative of English. Borrowing a word, or even a few dozen words, from another language does not make it a derivative. English, while it gleefully borrows loanwords from everywhere, is derived from French and German (or, to be more accurate, from Anglo-Norman and Proto-Germanic).
Can I also add that "Arabic numbers" - the numbers we use today, are actually of Indian origin, the Arabs translated the Indian logic/math texts into Arabic, and Western society used the Arabic translations (and additions like those of "Algorithm")
I have it on consumer-grade authority that the Indians got them in turn from the Shang dynasty, decimal since ca.1200BCE. Thus proving conclusively that numeral systems naturally travel deasil. Ne'er let thine diʒits, goe widdershins.
Also as long as we are going down the terminology nerd rabbit hole: it's Arabic numerals, not numbers. Numbers refers to the abstract concept, numerals refers to the method one uses to write them down.
Yeah - I quoted that to show that it was normal usage rather than technical correctness - I also did the same for the name that I didn't have the correct spelling for as I wrote the comment - not sure if I should update it (with your input) or to leave it and let people work down the thread
I forgot that cipher used to have a different meaning: zero, via Arabic. In some languages it means digit.