The word Algorithm comes from a mathematician named al-Khwarizmi. Many words that begin with Al (Arabic definite article) are of Arabic origin. Alcohol is another one :)
[1] http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Mathematicians/Al-Kh...
This source[1] states it as
>the science of restoring what is missing and equating like with like
To my mind, mathematically it would be closest to the literal concept of integration, but that is calculus and not what is generally considered to be algebra.
The book's name in English is: "The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing"
So Al-jabr meaning is very close to "calculation by Completion" in that context.
This is also the origin of some definite articles in romance languages - el in Spanish and l' in French. So Alhambra in Spain might have been called Al Hambra or similar instead.
Interestingly, in Persian (which uses Arabic script and shares some loanwords) which is a totally different language, the definite article is assumed, and it instead has an explicit indefinite article (-i or -yi) added to a noun/adjective.
Allah is just the Arabic cognate, plus the definiteness marker. So yes, anyone speaking Arabic will use that word to refer to any god, and anyone speaking Arabic in the past would have used that word to refer to any god. Similarly, a German today wouldn't hesitate to apply the word "Gott" ("god") to Thor, because Thor is a god. Whether the hypothetical German is Christian isn't really relevant, and neither is the fact that the Christian god is nameless, being usually referred to by a title such as "God", "Lord", "Father", etc.
Inherited from what developed as a norm in Judaism, where the name existed but then stopped being read (the most famous "one who must not be named"), but the original name of the deity is preserved in the given names used around the world:
I've read that the form "Jehovah" results from reading YHWH as if it had the vowel points of the word adonai, "lord". But I can't help noticing that the prefix form of YHWH in names, for which the vowels are known, is yeho-. That really adds some credibility to "Jehovah", except that "Jehovah" supposedly comes from a completely unrelated convention.
How much do we know about the original vowels? How true is the adonai story?
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11305-names-of-go...
is good and that it gives the sources to its claims. I'm not aware that the later scholars refuted the relevant points for this topic:
"At least as early as the third century B.C. the name seems to have been regarded by the Jews as a "nomen ineffabile," on the basis of a somewhat extreme interpretation of Ex. xx. 7 and Lev. xxiv. 11 (see Philo, "De Vita Mosis," iii. 519, 529). Written only in consonants, the true pronunciation was forgotten by them. The Septuagint, and after it the New Testament, invariably render δκύριος ("the Lord")."
Note: the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew bible to Greek is effectively what was since the development of Christianity called by the Christians "the Old Testament" and the Christian bible textual analysis proves that the authors of the New Testament almost exclusively used only the Greek translation and also wrote the New Testament as Greek native speakers in Greek, having even misunderstandings from interpreting the Greek words differently than the original Hebrew, even if Hebrew could also be misinterpreted during reading, but not in the same way. Anyway, that's how other languages got the "Lord" and equivalents in their translations from what was originally written: from the Septuagint and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BA%CF%8D%CF%81%CE%B9%CE%B... (note the difference from the 1906 Jewish quote).
Anyway, there is also the article about Jehovah, "mispronunciation (introduced by Christian theologians, but almost entirely disregarded by the Jews) of the Hebrew "Yhwh"":
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/8568-jehovah
And this is where the faith of these involved in the discussion can influence their interpretation even more.
Still I believe this statement is true:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragrammaton#Yahweh
"Gesenius's proposal to read YHWH as יַהְוֶה is accepted as the best scholarly reconstructed vocalised Hebrew spelling of the Tetragrammaton" (i.e. transliterated into English as Yahweh)"
So the theophoric names use vowels unrelated to the original pronunciation? Those names all postdate the loss of the vowels?
I would be pretty surprised if that were true. Are the vowels in theophoric names fixed by some consideration other than the vowels in the word from which the names derive?
It’s not about all names, I guess you ask about YHWH. If you follow the links from previous messages you can see that we have information how the Greeks pronounced it and also the linguistic hints known to the language experts. Based on both it is quite accepted that it’s pronounced approximately yahweh with probably silent h and the ending e sounding like English a in an article like in “a house”. So the alternative maybe simpler spelling would be yaaw. But then people would ask where both h went.
Also note that English pronouncing of J from the German transcriptions like in “Jar” is always wrong, it should always be Y.
Yes, Arab alchemists preceded European alchemists.