Hacker News Reader

Comment by pinkmuffinere | Hacker News Reader

lol I never made that connection — in Turkish, zero is sıfır, which does sound a lot like cipher. Also, password is şifre, which again sounds similar. Looking online, apparently the path is sifr (Arabic, meaning zero) -> cifre (French, first meaning zero, then any numeral, then coded message) -> şifre (Turkish, code/cipher)

View on HN

Nice! Imagine the second meaning going back to Arabic and now it's a full loop! It can even override the original meaning given enough time and popularity (not especially for "zero", but possibly for another full-loop word).

0 is a full loop!

The Turkish password word may be the same used for signature? I suspect so, because in Greek we have the Greek word for signature but also a Turkish loan word τζίφρα (djifra).

imza is signature while şifre is password. I imagine the conflation occurred because signatures are used like passwords for authentication...

Likewise, the monogram of the sitting english monarch (as seen on postboxes and so forth) is the "Royal Cypher".

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

Hmm i don’t think that one is related in Turkish — i only know of “imza” as signature, but there could also be other variants.

In Romanian:

- cifru -> cipher

- cifră -> digit

In Spanish:

- cifrar -> to encipher

- cifra -> digit

I wasn't sure how encipher is in Romanian (it's not common), it's "a cifra". The infinitive in Romanian puts "a" in front of the verb, so it's very close to Spanish.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com