interesting... i wonder what the languages of the past where like
Well, I know a fair amount of Italian and also Latin and there's some similarity but it's changed very much in the past 2,000 years or so.
Old English, or "engelsc" as it was known 1,100 years ago, well, I, a native English speaker, can just about decode it but it's a bit odd looking. There's a translation of Wikipedia into Anglo-Saxon actually... dinner is served.
Math followed much the same type development. the concept of the number zero and the early development of modern Math is of Arabic origin as are modern numbers.
Oddly the modern European numbers are more like the true Arabic while what is now used in Arabic is of more like the old Farsi.
In math the symbols used today are fairly modern and of German origin. the articles in the opening post appear to be accurate..
The symbols for plus and minus
The symbols of elementary arithmetic are almost wholly algebraic, most of them being transferred to the numerical field only in the 19th century, partly to aid the printer in setting up a page and partly because of the educational fashion then dominant of demanding a written analysis for every problem. When we study the genesis and development of the algebraic symbols of operation, therefore, we include the study of the symbols in arithmetic. Some idea of the status of the latter in this respect may be obtained by looking at almost any of the textbooks of the 17th and 18th centuries. Hodder in 1672 wrote "note that a + (plus) sign doth signifie Addition, and two lines thus = Equality, or Equation, but a X thus, Multiplication," no other symbols being used. His was the first English arithmetic to be reprinted in the American colonies in Boston in 1710. Even Recorde (c1510-1558), who invented the modern sign of equality, did not use it in his arithmetic, the Ground of Artes (c1542), but only in his algebra, the Whetstone of witte (1557). (Smith p395)
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