In particular, x, which we first encountered in mathematics in elementary school, was not representative of something previously unknown to us. Later, X-ray started to appear in many terms such as Malcolm X.
Before we get you too excited, let’s embark on x’s journey to becoming the unknown. But after reading the article, it is very possible that you will look at the letter x as two lines extending to infinity rather than a letter!
The symbolism of the letter X is “search and invention”.
The meeting of two lines at a single point, as in the letter X, or the letter x consisting of arrows pointing to a single point from all directions, east, west, north and south, represents the ‘search and invention’ in our lives.
To understand the unknown defined as X, we need to go back almost 2000 years from the present. At that time, the Islamic world, which hosted many scientific studies, trained scholars who contributed to the development of modern science. Since the works of these people were in Arabic, many scientific terms today have their origins in Arabic.
The expression “al-algebra”, which means “the reconciliation of independent parts”, has also passed into the western language as “algebra”.
Khwarizmi, who lived in the 9th century and was one of the founders of modern mathematics, laid the foundations of mathematics with his studies on Classical Greek, Indian and Egyptian sources while working at the Information Council in Baghdad in 832. It had such an impact that for centuries, mathematics was symbolically known in Europe as “al-Khwarizmi” mathematics. Since the first letter of his name is difficult to pronounce in European languages, it turned into “al-Gwarizmi”. Today, this term is used as an “algorithm”.
The interest in the works of Islamic scholars who came to Spain and Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries caused these works to be translated into Spanish immediately.
Some letters that did not have a Spanish equivalent in Arabic made translation difficult. One of them is the letter şīn.
There is no letter in Spanish that makes the “ş” sound. The letter S is also the first letter of the word “seylan”, which means “something”. As a solution to this, they used the Greek letter χ, which is pronounced “çi” in Greek for “shi” and is represented by a sign similar to the Latin x. Of course, there was another prediction as well. Accordingly, they used the conjunction ϗ, which is read as “kai” (και), which is a common word in Greek texts, and means “and”. Although there is no definitive proof, it is said that the symbol çi and the conjunction “kai” used by the Spaniards for the unknown gave way to the letter “x” in Latin over time.
But for some, it’s not about the pronunciation, it’s about the meaning of the word.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary offered a theory on this topic. According to the theory, European scholars changed the Arabic “thing” sound to Greek as “xei” and started to shorten it to X only. There is also the Greek word “xenos” meaning “unknown”.
In short, we identified X with the unknown, since only 0.15% of English words contain the letter x, but because Spaniards cannot pronounce the letter “ş”.
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