Cool Article

Marhaba,

To my 401 students:

There will be a spelling quiz on Tuesday. You are responsible for everything we've covered thus far in class.

To my 503 students:

There will be a quiz on Thursday. You are responsible for everything we've reviewed in class thus far.

On a different subject, I found a very cool article about how Arabic played a huge role in the spread of science. The full article can be found in the May June 2007 edition of Saudi Aramco World.

But here is a taste of it:

"A thousand years before English emerged as the international language of science in the latter half of the 20th century, the Arabic language unified scholars across the Muslim world, generating a lively market of ideas from Samarkand to Córdoba. “A book published in Central Asia could be read in southern Spain less than a year later,” explains Roshdi Rashed, an eminent Egyptian-born historian of science, in his office near Paris. “Islamic learning was not like Greek science, which was limited principally to the eastern Mediterranean, but was spread across most of the known world.”

"One celebrated example is the Kitab al-Istikmal, a treatise on geometry by Yusuf al-Mu’taman, the 11th-century king of Sarakusta (today’s Zaragosa in northern Spain). The Jewish philosopher Maimonides brought it from Córdoba to Cairo and copies were soon circulating in Baghdad. The work was eventually republished in the 13th century in Central Asia.

"Among the babel of scientists and scholars who crisscrossed the polyglot Muslim empire, the common language was Arabic. “Besides Maimonides, you have the great mathematician and physicist Alhazen (Ibn al-Haitham) moving from Basra to Cairo,” says Rashed, “and the astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi journeying every year from Khorasan in northern Iran through Iraq and on to Aleppo to teach.” Even if scholars spoke Persian or another language at home, they wrote their papers in Arabic so that their colleagues in Baghdad, Toledo and elsewhere could understand them, he adds. Omar Khayyam may have penned his quatrains in Persian, but he explicated his mathematical concepts in Arabic. Correspondence among scientists—typically carried by cara- van messenger or carrier pigeon—was nearly as far-reaching in the 11th and 12th centuries as it was in the 17th, Rashed maintains.

"But despite its ultimate ascendancy, scholarly Arabic had a slow start. “Before the advent of science, Arabic was the language of poetry; it soon became the language of the new religion of Islam, but paradoxically, it did not become the language of power right away,” explains French science historian Ahmed Djebbar. Although the Umayyad caliph ‘Abd al-Malik decreed at the beginning of the eighth century that government institutions, schools, courts and communications conduct their business in Arabic, it took another 50 to 100 years before the translation of scientific texts from Greek, Syriac, Persian and Indian languages into Arabic got under way in earnest, with some 100 translators at work over the course of the ninth and 10th centuries, according to the 10th-century bibliographer Ibn al-Nadim of Baghdad.

"Baghdad’s Bayt al-Hikmah (“House of Wisdom”) became a vibrant center of translation. Works like Ptolemy’s Almagest and Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica were translated numerous times as scholars perfected Arabic terminology. The Greek word parabola was initially Arabicized phonetically as barabula, then subsequently refined to qat za’id, which literally means “thick section.” Diabetes was first rendered as diyabita then transformed to da as-sukkar (“sugar sickness”). Over time, Arabic scientific terms and star names were adopted into other languages, a list that includes alkali, alcohol, algebra, algorithm, alembic, alchemy, azimuth, elixir, nadir, zenith, Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, Rigel and Mizar.

"After some seven centuries in which Arabic dominated scientific discourse, it began to be eclipsed in the 15th century by Turkish as Ottoman rule expanded. Ghiyath al-Kashi’s 1427 mathematical treatise Risala al-Muhitiya (Treatise on the Circumference), in which he calculated the value of pi to 17 decimal places, was one of the last significant scientific texts in Arabic. By the time Taqi al-Din, the director of the Istanbul observatory, wrote his books in Arabic on light and marvelous machines in the second half of the 16th century, Latin had largely supplanted Arabic as the universal language of science. Unlike Arabic, however, which was understood by all classes and gave ordinary Muslims access to scholarly knowledge, Latin was used principally by academics and clergy, fencing science in as the preserve of an educated elite."