[HN Gopher] Gerard of Cremona
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Gerard of Cremona
Author : teleforce
Score : 35 points
Date : 2026-03-26 07:52 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| jmclnx wrote:
| Unfortunately 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 ?
| canjobear wrote:
| > 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.
| christkv wrote:
| And its a fabrication of history
| Beijinger wrote:
| 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.
| riffraff wrote:
| 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
| Kh (chi) :)
| yorwba wrote:
| 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.or
| g/wiki/History_of_algebra#The_symbol_...
| WillAdams wrote:
| 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)
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _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?
| christkv wrote:
| 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.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| Nevertheless, many of the texts from the Greeks were first
| translated into Latin from Arabic copies in Spain from the
| 11th century, because the Greek versions were inaccessible in
| Western Europe until Constantinople was conquered in 1453 and
| the scholars escaped to the west with their scrolls
| christkv wrote:
| They transmitted the text yeah but they were not the
| "preserver" of the roman legacy. The byzantines viewed
| themselves as romans.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| I was talking about Greek texts rather than Roman legacy,
| whatever that means. Arabs certainly preserved some of
| the Greek texts, because many haven't survived in
| origianl Greek manuscripts:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeco-
| Arabic_translation_move...
|
| The Muslims also made original contributions to science,
| e.g. Ibn Sahl discovering what later became known as
| Snell's law of refraction.
| fmajid wrote:
| Not just ancients' knowledge, algebra comes from a corruption
| of al-jabr in Musa al Khwarizmi's "al-Kitab al-Mukhtasar fi
| Hisab al-Jabr wal-Muqabalah". al-Khwarzimi himself got
| corrupted to algorismus, from which the word algorithm came
| from. Also, 2/3 of named stars have Arabic-origin names. Arabic
| influence on medecine and chemistry was significant, the word
| alcohol is also of Arabic origin, as is Chemistry via al-
| kimiya, alchemy. And finally, admirals are amir-al-bahr, emirs
| of the sea.
| tgv wrote:
| The fall of Rome is 5th century, so it predates Islam, doesn't
| it?
| riffraff wrote:
| That's the western half, but ehen the Ottomans annexed
| bisantium in 1400 they still considered themselves Romans,
| even tho they spoke Greek. The date of the fall of Rome is
| pretty arbitrary.
|
| The sultan took the title of kaiser-i-rum (Caesar of Rome).
| layer8 wrote:
| Rather, thanks to the scholars of the Byzantine Empire, aka the
| Eastern Roman Empire.
| nestorD wrote:
| For people wondering why the Islamic world would have had more
| texts, many of which are of western (Greek/Latin) origin, than
| the western world. The problem is that, as the Roman empire
| collapsed, papyrus supply disappeared in the west (while north
| Africa still had papyrus, and later early paper) forcing copyist
| to use-significantly more expensive and lower supply-parchment.
| As the texts on papyrus started to crumble to dust, monks had to
| decide which ones to save given the limited writing material
| available (so they saved a lot of Saint Augustin...).
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