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Comment by yard2010 | Hacker News Reader

yard2010

It's quite funny imo that someday english people were like "forget about latin or german, greek is lit! Let's use greek"

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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!

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jy%C4%81,_koti-jy%C4%81_and_...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sine_and_cosine#Etymology

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!

Arabic is also popular, particularly in maths.

Is it? I can only think of (the very frequently noted) ‘algebra’ and ‘algorithm’.

azimuth is the only other one I can think of off the top of my head

You'll find "zenith" at your feet.

You're thinking of nadir, also Arabic. The zenith is in the opposite direction.

Gah! So much for my wit.

Also ‘zero’, and ‘cipher’ (which, oddly, derive from the same word). And ‘average’. There are a few of them.

Not math but I just learned alkali is the word for "ash" in Arabic.

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.

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.

They're asking about Arabic loanwords.

If you add all Latin words with Greek origins, most European languages are really forms of Greek

And “alcohol”, frequently consumed at science and math conferences

"Alcohol" has a very interesting etymology, too.

As others have said, there are a few celestial terms that come to mind:

  - azimuth
  - zenith
  - nadir

Also some chemistry terms, again just from top of brain, might be wrong:

  - alchemy
  - elixir
  - arsenic
  - alkali

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.

Ah, yes. I knew it wasn’t quite the right word.

Sofa!

> Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of this device.

―C. P. Scott

The sheriff says "hold my beer".

A funny false or convergent etymology - shire reeve not sharif.

Here's another false trail from a real conversation:

  Q: What US state's name comes from the title of an Arabic ruler?

  A: Al Abama?

Of course, the correct answer is California from Khalifa transliterated through a Spanish novel:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_California#Las_Se...

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

Don't most European languages use Landis loan words from both Latin and Greek? Both used to be taught in classical education.

What makes you think it was the English? I am pretty sure it comes from continental Europe.

Latin is lemniscus, so someday Latin people were like “let’s use Greek”

Latin writers have been like "let's use Greek" at least since Virgil, so modern writers can be excused for getting their roots mixed up.

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