Comment by esafak

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipher#Etymology

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..

https://thebetterindia.com/270912/chaturbhuj-temple-in-gwali...

World's oldest known evidence of Mathematical Zero and numerals - ancient inscription on wall of Chaturbhuj temple in Gwalior, India.

https://www.glam.ox.ac.uk/article/carbon-dating-finds-bakhsh...

Bakhshali manuscript (stored in Oxford) from ancient India/Bharat - is the world's oldest text having Mathematical Zero and equations.

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…

Ah, but you need to dig deeper, my friend.

"Algorithm" is derived from Al-Khwarizmi, but only because he translated the ancient Indian/Hindu "Sulba Sutras" texts into Persian, especially in his "Al Jabr" text.

"Sulba Sutra" literally means "method of problem solving". So the Sukna Sutras were all basically Algorithms - different ways to solve mathematical and scientific problems.

In fact, Al Khwarizmi himself borrowed the title of the original Indian/Hindu texts for his translations and he even acknowledged their Indian/Hindu origin. That's why the meaning of the full title of the Al Jabr book is "The Concise Book of Calculation by Restoration and Balancing" (because that's how algebraic equations are understood and solved).

This Al Jabr book (based on Hindu methods of problem solving and algebraic equations) got translated and understood by British and Europeans, so they simply named this new (new to them) branch of Mathematics as Algebra (derived from "Al Jabr").

SOURCE: the British scholar "Robert of Chester" who translated the Al Jabr book to Latin (during 1876-2956, published in 1915, under book title "Algebra of al-Khowarizmi") documented that the ancient Indians knew the algebraic equations BEFORE Al Khwarizmi. Not only that, Robert also confirmed the ancient Indians knew and used the Pythagorean triangle theorem before the time of Pythagoras.

You can check and read these evidences for yourself please. Sources are linked below.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181118154937/http://library.al...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_of_Chester

https://archive.org/details/robertofchesters00khuw

Trivia: in 1974, IBM released an advertisement, in which it gave the credit of Algebra to most ancient Indian mathematicians. In the advertisement, IBM had explained 'How India gave the world the logic of indeterminate equations' by naming three prominent historic mathematicians: Aryabhata, Bhaskara and Brahmagupta, who developed the concept of Algebra and gave meaning to something (Zero) which was termed to be meaningless before.

The IBm ad proclaimed: "History owes a debt to three Indian mathematicians of 1500 years ago who developed Algebra to give meaning to the meaningless. Bhaskara, who originated the radical signs. Brahmagupta, who created the symbols. Aryabhata, who worked out the first equations. A search that continues today in new directions with newer tools, among them, a machine that helps man in more ways than any other inventions in history: the computer. We are proud that IBM introduced the manufacturing of computers and other data processing equipment in India, which are helping the nation meet the challenge of building a new tomorrow," reads the IBM advertisement.

IBM's advertisement also features an excerpt 'The Poetry of Algebra' from the book Indian Wisdom by Sir Monier Monier-Williams.

* Among the several contributions made by Aryabhata, he discovered the nine planets and found out the correct number of days in a year i.e. 365. * Brahmagupta made one of the most significant contributions to mathematics when he introduced zero(0), which once stood for “nothing”. * Bhāskara declared that any number divided by zero is infinity and that the sum of any number and infinity is also infinity. * 2000 years before Fibinacci, the Indian scholar Pingala discovered and documented by 200 BC the series we today call as Fibonacci series. Pingala wrote the Chandahśāstra, a treatise on prosody — poetic meter. To study Sanskrit meters, he analyzed long and short syllables, generating combinations using what we would now call binary patterns and recursive enumeration. And in doing so, he uncovered (and documented) the interesting series we today call as Fibonacci series.

0 is a full loop!

imza is signature while şifre is password. I imagine the conflation occurred because signatures are used like passwords for authentication...

Hmm i don’t think that one is related in Turkish — i only know of “imza” as signature, but there could also be other variants.

In Spanish:

- cifrar -> to encipher

- cifra -> digit

> All world languages are a deviation from Arabic

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).

This doesn’t sound right. What about Chinese?

Isn’t the implication that cipher is a loanword? So language relatedness is irrelevant?

We use “arabic” numerals around the world. So use of an Arabic loan word is unsurprising.

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.

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"

Arabic -> Tamil <- Arabic - Sanskrit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0#Etymology

Buddy English has no "shared root" with Japanese but we still say sushi.

What does it mean when someone creates a new account for posting contradictory comments?