Summary of ' Why is X the Unknown?' by Terry Moore

Why is it the letter X represents the unknown? The answer is because in Spanish they can’t say “sh”. TerryMoory tell us about its historical.

When he decided to learn Arabic about six years ago. Writing in Arabic is like crafting an equation because every part is extremely precise and carries a lot of information. The little system in Arabic is called Al-jebra. Al-jebra roughly translates to the system for reconciling disparate parts. Al-jebra finally came into English as algebra.

The Arabic texts containing mathematical wisdom finally made the way to Europe which is to say Spain. But, there are some sounds in Arabic that just don’t make it through a European voice box without lots of practice.

The letter Sheen ‘SH’ is the first letter of the word Shalan which mean ‘something’. In Arabic, we can make this definite by adding the definite article ‘al’, al-shalan which mean ‘the unknown thing’.

The letter Sheen and the word Shalan can’t be rendered into Spanish because Spanish doesn’t have ‘sh’ saound. So by convention, they created a rule in which they borrowed the ‘ck’ sound from the classical Greek in the form of the letter Kai. Later when to say Latin they simply replaced the Greek Kai with the Latin X.