Shakespeare often spelt the same word differently at different times. If it was good enough for Billy Shakespeare, it should be good enough for modern-day mathematicians, forsooth.
The first of Shakespeare plays predate the first published English documentary. It was uncommon for spellings to be inconsistent or change between writings to be easier for a particular audience (in this case, actors) to be able to read.
I’m still making my way through it, but reading a history of shakespearean/elizabethan england, the first written publications of shakespeare’s plays that were accessible to the general public weren’t written by the man himself (if indeed he was singular).
There were entire efforts put towards pirating the plays by writing them, mostly from memory. It’s believed that someone in the crowd creating a stenographic copy would’ve been noticed so this is a less likely explanation. The memorial effort likely involved both audience and actors. “Official” versions meant to direct the stage productions might have been smuggled out or lost and found.
I haven’t gotten to the part yet that connects to the standard versions we have today. Some official versions were released to correct the record on bad pirated versions. Sometimes theaters would sell official versions to shore up funds.
Maybe this would explain the multiple shakespeare theory as well as writing inconsistencies?
Yeah; frankly, in almost all languages, some early works of literature tend to be THE thing that establishes canonical spelling. A lot of this is simply that they act as an argument-settler when two people can't agree how something "ought to be" spelled. In fact, sometimes they go so far as to warp pronunciation, cementing little verbal quirks that only some speakers had.
Why stop at greek or arabic when you can go all the way to sanskrit?
The words for sine and cosine derive from the sanskrit jiva (meaning bowstring, i.e., the chord of a circle)[1]. Sine and cosine were respectively jya and koti-jya, which got transcribed into arabic without the vowel (where it meant nothing). They then pronounced the vowel in the wrong place, calling it jeb (which meant pocket or fold in arabic)[2]. Then this wrong word got translated into latin as sinus (fold), and hence we have sine and cosine!
The wikipedia link has this occurring in the 12th century. But Hellenistic astronomers were already working with sine tables. What did they call the concept?
A healthy mixture was always preferred in maths and science. This is occasionally taken to extremes; the name reverse transcriptase, an enzyme used by retroviruses, is a combo of English, Latin and Greek!
Interesting. I'm not sure we can really call these arabic-derived, though. They do seem to ultimately trace back to fairly unrelated arabic words, but their first use in mathematics (much later) seems to have come in the form of a mixture of words from European languages. The two examples I gave seem to be more legitimately Arabic in origin.
Nadir always seemed very obviously Arabic to me. Weirdly, I first encountered it in a book on category theory, and only after that did I start to hear it used in everyday English to mean the opposite of 'apex'.
It's the opposite of zenith, another word ultimately derived from Arabic.
The difference between an apex and a zenith is that an apex exists as a point in space, while a zenith is a direction, with no fixed point which may be said to be "the" zenith. There are other differences given that apex has a few related meanings, but this is the main one.
Dolphin, music (from muse), logic, ethics, physics, mathematics, pharmacy, angel, comedy, drama. The list of Greek loan words that are shared by many European languages goes on and on
Edit: I think almost every word with "ph" in it is from Greek and "th" in languages other than English.
Two of these...do not belong?