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pinkmuffinere 6 hours ago

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)

cgio 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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).

esafak 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

NextHendrix 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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

pinkmuffinere 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

celaleddin 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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).

ls-a 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

rmunn 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> All world languages are a deviation from Arabic

Spouse of a linguist here. That is absolutely not true. To summarize a LOT, there are multiple languages that share common roots, which linguists classify into language "families". If you go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_families#Spok... and sort the list by number of current speakers (which adds up to far more than the population of the world because so many people speak two or more languages), you'll find the top five language families are Indo-European (which includes most European languages, including English), Sino-Tibetan (which includes Chinese), Atlantic-Congo (which includes Bantu and many other languages spoken in Africa, most of which you probably won't have heard of unless you're a linguist or you live in Africa), Afroasiatic (which includes Arabic), and Austronesian (which includes Tagalog, which you might know by the name Filipino).

It might be possible to claim that the Afroasiatic languages are all derived from Arabic, but the only influence that the Arabic language has had on Indo-European languages such as English is via loanwords (like algebra, for example). This does not make English a derivative of Arabic any more than Japanese (which has borrowed several English words such as カメラ, "kamera", from camera) is a derivative of English. Borrowing a word, or even a few dozen words, from another language does not make it a derivative. English, while it gleefully borrows loanwords from everywhere, is derived from French and German (or, to be more accurate, from Anglo-Norman and Proto-Germanic).

awesome_dude 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Can I also add that "Arabic numbers" - the numbers we use today, are actually of Indian origin, the Arabs translated the Indian logic/math texts into Arabic, and Western society used the Arabic translations (and additions like those of "Algorithm")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu%E2%80%93Arabic_numeral_s...

inopinatus 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I have it on consumer-grade authority that the Indians got them in turn from the Shang dynasty, decimal since ca.1200BCE. Thus proving conclusively that numeral systems naturally travel deasil. Ne'er let thine diʒits, goe widdershins.

bigstrat2003 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Also as long as we are going down the terminology nerd rabbit hole: it's Arabic numerals, not numbers. Numbers refers to the abstract concept, numerals refers to the method one uses to write them down.

inopinatus 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

it's a cardinal rule

awesome_dude 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah - I quoted that to show that it was normal usage rather than technical correctness - I also did the same for the name that I didn't have the correct spelling for as I wrote the comment - not sure if I should update it (with your input) or to leave it and let people work down the thread

ls-a 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

867-5309 4 hours ago | parent [-]

for fellow non-linguists, that was Ignorantese for "trust me, bro"

drivebyhooting 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This doesn’t sound right. What about Chinese?

astrange 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Basque and Pirahā are the good ones.

jjtheblunt 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

i'm quite sure the person was joking