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.
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