Gerard of Cremona
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Gerard of Cremona
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Re: Gerard of Cremona
#2[dead]
Re: Gerard of Cremona
#3Unfortunately few people know without the Muslim Scholars after the fall of Rome, little of the ancient texts would have survived.
But I wonder, was some meaning lost from Greek|Latin -> Arabic -> Latin ?
Re: Gerard of Cremona
#4Unfortunately few people know without the Muslim Scholars after the fall of Rome, little of the ancient texts would have survived. But I wonder, was some meaning lost from Greek|Latin -> Arabic -> Latin ?
> Unfortunately few people know without the Muslim Scholars after the fall of Rome, little of the ancient texts would have survived.
I was taught this many times in US schools.
Re: Gerard of Cremona
#5Unfortunately few people know without the Muslim Scholars after the fall of Rome, little of the ancient texts would have survived. But I wonder, was some meaning lost from Greek|Latin -> Arabic -> Latin ?
Greek|Latin -> Arabic -> Latin
His pupil, the English scholastic Daniel of Morley, recorded one of Gerhard's methods[6] in translation: His Mozarabic assistant Ghalib (Latinized Galippus)[7] translated the text orally into medieval Castilian, Gerhard listened and wrote the text down in Latin. In the case of the Almagest, which had been translated from its original language of Ancient Greek first into Syriac, then into Arabic, and which Gerhard translated into Latin via the oral route of Castilian, this long chain of transmission introduced numerous sources of error.
Re: Gerard of Cremona
#6Unfortunately few people know without the Muslim Scholars after the fall of Rome, little of the ancient texts would have survived. But I wonder, was some meaning lost from Greek|Latin -> Arabic -> Latin ?
I think it's pretty sure some of it was.
Just consider that the X in math is not a latin X but a Greek Χ (chi) :)
Re: Gerard of Cremona
#7Unfortunately few people know without the Muslim Scholars after the fall of Rome, little of the ancient texts would have survived. But I wonder, was some meaning lost from Greek|Latin -> Arabic -> Latin ?
I think it's pretty sure some of it was. Just consider that the X in math is not a latin X but a Greek Χ (chi) :)
Most mathematical notation wasn't invented until centuries later. At the time, they would just write calculations out in words. In particular, the use of x representing an unknown quantity was introduced by Descartes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_algebra#The_symbol_...
Re: Gerard of Cremona
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's pretty sure some of it was. Just consider that the X in math is not a latin X but a Greek Χ (chi) :)
Most mathematical notation wasn't invented until centuries later. At the time, they would just write calculations out in words. In particular, the use of x representing an unknown quantity was introduced by Descartes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_algebra#The_symbol_...
For folks who are curious of this, one potential example/discussion of this is Thomas Harriot's _Artis Analyticae Praxis_ (ob. discl., I did some of the typesetting of the Muriel Seltman/Robert Goulding translation)
Re: Gerard of Cremona
#9Unfortunately few people know without the Muslim Scholars after the fall of Rome, little of the ancient texts would have survived. But I wonder, was some meaning lost from Greek|Latin -> Arabic -> Latin ?
> Unfortunately few people know without the Muslim Scholars after the fall of Rome, little of the ancient texts would have survived.
Did not Muslim Scholars originally get the texts from Nestorian and Syriac Christians in the Middle East? Wouldn't there be a good chance of the text surviving in their monasteries?
Re: Gerard of Cremona
#10Unfortunately few people know without the Muslim Scholars after the fall of Rome, little of the ancient texts would have survived. But I wonder, was some meaning lost from Greek|Latin -> Arabic -> Latin ?
This is not even close to true. The Byzantine Empire was the keeper of all of this western knowledge. The arabs got their texts from them and the Spanish from them and the Byzantines. The arabs did trade texts from India to Europe as well.